Our future is at great risk. The Doomsday Clock now stands at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been. Through decades of political failure to tackle the climate emergency, and today’s unhinged rush to adopt AI with hardly any regulatory measures in place, humanity is teetering on a cliff edge.
For young adults, and those in middle age, it’s incredibly difficult to plan for mid-century, when we’re not sure what the rest of this decade holds.
The Climate Emergency
It’s widely acknowledged by climate scientists including Dr James Hansen, that we’ve overshot the Paris climate goal of limiting global temperatures to 1.5C. Even the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, conceded this point ahead of the COP30 summit in Belém.
According to Climate Action Tracker, the world is headed for a disastrous 2.6C of warming by the end of the century. This also exceeds the upper Paris climate target of preventing 2C of warming.
Concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions continue to soar. Carbon dioxide emissions increased by a record amount in 2024, as did the other two major greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 levels in 2024 were 423.9ppm, which is significantly higher than the safe level of 350ppm, and shockingly worse than the pre-industrial level of 280ppm. Nearly 38 years after James Hansen’s Senate Testimony on global warming, and 30 (failed) COP climate summits later, we’re still heading rapidly in the wrong direction.
As Luke Kemp, writes in his excellent book, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, “The climate change we face is an order of magnitude (ten-fold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90 per cent of life on earth 252 million years ago.”
Political failure, relentless lobbying by the fossil fuel industry (data from Open Secrets shows that the oil and gas industry spent over $3 billionin the US on lobbying, between 1998 and 2025), and lack of clarity from the media, have turned climate breakdown into one of the greatest threats society has ever faced.
Decades of warnings falling on deaf ears have come back to haunt our reckless species.
Ecological Collapse
The climate crisis is just one part of the wider ecological crisis. In the UK’s recently released national security assessment on biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, it states that “Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair).”
When will this collapse occur? The report states, “There is a realistic possibility that some ecosystems (such as coral reefs in South East Asia and boreal forests) start to collapse from 2030, and others (rainforests and mangroves) start to collapse from 2050.”
The impacts of ecosystem collapse will be profound; society as we know it will radically change. Just one impact will be food insecurity. According to the report, “Without significant increases in UK food system and supply chain resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.”
This should be headline news. I first heard about this through George Monbiot’s excellent article in the Guardian, which I highly recommend. Bear in mind this report was produced by the joint intelligence committee (which includes all our Secret Services). Thus, this report carries even more weight and significance.
And yet, world leaders appear to have ignored this issue. There is no clamour. There is no outcry. But, there is a deathly silence which should be a massive cause for concern for all of us.
The AI Crisis
Humanity has struggled to come to grips with the climate and ecological crises. But, now the tech industry has entered the societal collapse arena by thrusting the AI crisis upon us. Given how rapidly AI is being rolled out and the many risks it brings, there is potential for the AI crisis to outpace climate change in terms of urgency.
Perhaps the greatest AI risk comes from superintelligence, which many tech companies are trying to develop, despite acknowledging that it may wipe out humanity. One of the three ‘Godfathers of AI’ and Nobel prize-winner, Geoffrey Hinton has said there’s up to a 20% chance of AI causing human extinction within the next 30 years. Whilst in their book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares write that Geoffrey Hinton believes the risk is actually above 50%, but chooses not to say this publicly, “because there’s other people who think it’s less.”
Some AI experts believe that superintelligence could be a matter of years away. If that prediction is correct, and if our elected leaders fail to halt this catastrophic development, it means that many people alive today could witness the end of our troubled history. But, even if superintelligence is halted, other harms from AI may overwhelm us.
AI threatens societal upheaval by stealing a large portion of jobs from people. In his book, Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control, AI expert, Professor Stuart Russell says that up to a billion jobs are at risk from AI, while only “five to ten million” data scientist or robot engineer jobs may emerge. A quick calculation from his warning, results in 990 million people left unemployed.
Last year, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, warned that AI could result in an unemployment spike of 10-20% within the next five years, as AI wipes out half of entry-level jobs. In the UK alone, the IPPR thinktank predicted that up to 8m jobs could be taken by AI. An abundance of grim forecasts exists on job losses, and whichever one you choose to go with, the fact is that many people in the very near future could lose their profession.
What are these masses of unemployed people meant to do for paying their bills? For feeding their families? For keeping a roof over their heads? With mass unemployment firmly on the horizon, there is a very real danger that civil unrest and disorder could spread around the world.
Politicians aren’t planning for this scenario; nor are they planning assistance for these newly unemployed people. As well as the financial impact of losing a job, there is likely to be a grave mental health toll. People who’ve trained, qualified, and spent their lives within one profession may struggle if they don’t feel like they can start from scratch, or if there simply aren’t any jobs to apply for as AI has taken them. This could lead to widespread despair.
Job losses make up just a small part of the story. The House of Lords in the UK published a report on Large language models (LLMs) and generative AI. Some of the AI risks it discusses include cybercrime, terrorism, abuse images, misinformation, disinformation, the development of biological or chemical weapons, and failure of critical infrastructure.
Other risks include the threat AI poses to democracy by worsening polarisation, the illegal copyright theft that many writers and artists have experienced, and the fact that safety hasn’t been built into AI models. In pursuit of enormous profits, the tech industry has knowingly put us all in dire jeopardy.
Our politicians are equally to blame. In the UK, Keir Starmer has chosen to mainline “AI into the veins” of the country, whilst in the US, Trump is surrounded by tech bros, and has taken election money from the likes of Elon Musk.
Planning for… what future?
Given that chaos is now embedded into the future, as politicians have failed to tackle these massive urgent threats, the coming years will be filled with immense risk and potential suffering around the world. In a worst case scenario, a breakthrough on superintelligence may signal our immediate demise.
Not to mention that the human-made AI, climate, and ecological crises are happening simultaneously, so spiralling unemployment and civil unrest might be accompanied by the displacement and migration of many others due to extreme weather events and collapsing ecosystems.
As Luke Kemp writes in Goliath’s Curse, “It is hard to see how we can escape without a global collapse unfolding.” He lists predictions from a range of experts and says that, “Averaging these experts’ opinions gives us a one in three chance of facing a global collapse, or something far worse, by the end of the century.”
How can a young or middle-aged person plan for their retirement, when our jobs or our lives could be taken from us in this age of polycrisis? How will a savings account help if superintelligence brings history to an end next month or next year?
If you’re struggling to plan for the future, you’re not alone.
A completely unfair burden has been dumped on our shoulders. The idea of being able to live a ‘normal’ life like the generations that came before has been stolen from us. Instead, our lives will be determined by the actions of people within the fossil fuel and tech industries who’ve made the decision to push us to the brink. Not to mention the politicians who’ve sided with these industries, or chosen to kick the can down the road. For, we’ve now run out of road and there is nowhere left for the can to be kicked.
Things never had to get to this point. Even now, there still remains a window of opportunity to avert the worst case outcomes and to have some kind of liveable future. A switch to deliberative participatory democracy, with the likes of citizens’ assemblies seems like one of the few ways we can better our lot going forward. History has shown that this method has worked before, and it no doubt could work again. But to get that implemented will require a great number of people coming forward to fight for change.
I fear that as this hasn’t happened yet, then it may not happen in time. But, I hope that it will. For our future hinges on the will of the masses.
My cli-fi children’s picture book, Nanook and the Melting Arctic is available from Amazon, including Amazon UK and Amazon US. My eco-fiction children’s picture book, Hedgey-A and the Honey Bees about how pesticides affect bees, is available on Amazon’s global stores including Amazon UK and Amazon US.