Why the AI Merchants of Doom are Dead Wrong

Watts Up With That ^ | 9/11/2026 | Eric Worrall

[fireman15]

Hacking a weak computer system does not equal global doomsday.

The news has been full of articles recently about how we’re all going to die by 2030, 2027, or insert your year number.

(The piece then quotes from an article from another source... and then continues.)

For starters, we can discount the AI supervirus threat. AI doesn’t have to develop a doomsday virus, that world killing doomsday virus was already developed by the Aussie CSIRO in 2001 – who then promptly went on to tell everyone how to replicate their work. Aussie researchers stumbled across a simple genetic hack which sabotages the mammalian immune system, then witnessed its devastating effect when they inserted the genetic hack into a viral relative of smallpox. Then they tried the virus on some other rats to see if it killed all of them as well. Top marks for safety guys – it’s a wonder none of the scientists got infected.

My point is you don’t need AI to devastate the world with a supervirus – the research on how to do that has already been done.

As for AI copying and replicating itself, don’t make me laugh. Anyone who has ever done 3D printing or CNC machining, as I have, knows how crazy difficult it is to get the simplest processes right. The AI revolution would be over when the 3mm end mill snapped, and the US Postal Service refused to deliver a replacement. Who lost the batteries?

---

TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet; Hobbies; Science
KEYWORDS: ai; datacenters; doomer

[fireman15]

I would encourage others who are concerned about AI causing the deaths of all people to go to the actual article and read it...

[Organic Panic]

I have been having a great time using AI. I subscribe to Amres ai that gives access to the big ones and is easily worth the $20 a month. I even have a system set up to help my elderly mum have groceries ordered and delivered and it acts as a dietician when I feed the AI agent the latest blood test. I have AI code arduino and PLC in minutes for things that took me days. Even travel planning is great. Tell it where I am driving, how long I want to drive, what I am interested in, and it will spit out entire logistics for a trip.

I remember Y2K was going to kill is and the web would be destroyed by “spider” web crawlers.

[BFW]

It’s all paid mainland chinese ccp propganda.............

[Carry_Okie]

All these big players like Anthropic and OpenAI are looking increasingly like the mainframe bureaus of the 1970s, which all evaporated when mainframes dropped in price sufficiently that individuals and businesses which needed a powerful computer could buy their own.

Yo Anthony Watts!!! I've been saying for weeks amid all the noise that the desktop is where AI needs to go. I'm just waiting for it to be affordable as I do have work to do with it. To this point, AI has been the only means to evaluate the total corpus of my work because it's so huge and so multidisciplinary.

My concern about "AI" is that the data-centers represent an investor bubble and a terrible threat for control trips. I don't want MY data on the cloud. I'll do my own air-gapped backups thank you.

[Marionov]

I read this interesting article and was far from persuaded.

He does not in fact deny the theoretical possibility that AI could become what it is feared it could become, and do what it is feared it could do.

His easy-breezy dismissive style does a lot of work, and IMO undermines his credibility.

[fireman15]

I've been saying for weeks amid all the noise that the desktop is where AI needs to go. I'm just waiting for it to be affordable as I do have work to do with it.

I built a machine intended for local AI use before storage, memory and GPU prices went off the charts... Unfortunately, I did this just before the short window when AMD Strix Halo Mini PCs with 128GB of unified memory became available for reasonable prices.

So even though the machine I built has an NPU and is capable for many uses, and I have successfully run all sorts of local LLMs on it... I eventually had to admit that I missed the mark on true local AI usefulness. But since that time there have been exciting breakthroughs with newer open-source LLMs and tweaks with local AI which have caused running it to be useful on what is currently a $4000 or more machine.

https://youtu.be/d4EWA6yd5cE

This is more money than I am able to justify currently. But the writing is on the wall. When investors eventually start pulling the plug on massive data center projects, manufacturers will pivot to the components necessary for more capable local machines, and the prices will come back to earth. Local AI is the real future and not massive, power hungry, and ridiculously expensive data centers.

The price of a local machine with 128GB or more of unified memory and capable of handling more than what most people currently have a use for with remote AI will drop to less than $1500 within a year or two. And the concerns of sending all of your private information to a large corporation will be gone. The use cases for massive data centers will go back to the government and large corporations who want to keep track of the spending habits and activities of every one of us.

[fireman15]

His easy-breezy dismissive style does a lot of work, and IMO undermines his credibility.

Fear is the primary motivator that the government and large corporations use to get what they want. The person who wrote the article ended it with, “As a software developer and increasingly an AI specialist, I urge you all, please don't be fooled – AI doomsday is all infowars and mind games.”

The author is certainly not alone, the doom and gloom is being spread by the same people who spread doom and gloom about everything all of the time. If you want to characterize this as “easy breezy dismissiveness” and continue buying into this nonsense and keep moving with the herd... no one is stopping you.

I purchased my first AI software product many years ago at Computer City from a publisher that is long gone. The promises made to sell that software obviously did not live up to my expectations. I have been messing with AI products for years now and have learned enough about it to understand its great potential and its actual limitations. Despite the astronomical improvements... over 90% of what people believe about AI is hyped up nonsense and it just keeps getting worse.

[Carry_Okie]

When investors eventually start pulling the plug on massive data center projects, manufacturers will pivot to the components necessary for more capable local machines, and the prices will come back to earth.

Amen to that! I just did a RAM upgrade for faster-whisper dictation and that hurt all by itself. I'm sitting tight on my ASUS Prime Z590-P motherboard, Intel i7-10700 processor, 1TB M.2 drive, 6TB HDD, and NVIDIA GTX 3050 GPU through my conversion from Windoze to Ubuntu until then. At that time I'm betting I'll need to start over with a new tower.

If I could just find something smart enough to help finish the pdf outputs from my books, populating word-by-word translations of pointed Hebrew with parallel strongs numbers linked to the lexicon, and the Concordant Hebrew-English Sublinear, that alone would make it pay.

Then there's proof reading.