The Boy Who Cried AI

The story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is usually told as a morality tale about lying: a warning that if we tell lies, no one will believe us when we are telling the truth. But the real lesson of the story is about what happens when warnings lose their power. After enough false alarms from the shepherd boy about a make-believe wolf, the villagers stopped listening. They had been conditioned to believe that every danger was false. When the real wolf appeared to really eat the sheep, the tragedy was not just that the shepherd told too many lies; it was that the villagers no longer trusted anyone at all.

We are living in that village now as the AI doomers are promising civilizational collapse. Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, a leader in AI technology, warned on 𝕏 that “advanced systems could kill us all by the end of the decade.” He cautioned that the sudden emergence of “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources” is an existential threat that current safeguards can no longer restrain.

Much of the media has amplified these fears claiming that “far from abstract fears, these apocalyptic warnings are grounded in vulnerabilities breaking open right now—particularly inside healthcare IT networks, where sensitive patient record-keeping is rapidly being adjusted into AI tools.” But we have been warned too many times. We have learned that every shepherd boy seems to have an angle.

We are not dismissing warnings about AI because we think it is harmless. Many of us are dismissing the AI doomers because we have spent the past few decades being told that catastrophe was certain. The wolf has been promised so many times that even sincere warnings sound false. 

I understand this personally. I live in a house that was built more than one-hundred years ago on the ocean shore. It is the kind of house that former Vice President Al Gore once assured us would be swallowed by rising tides and surrendered to the sea years ago. Obviously, I didn’t believe him; but my flood insurance premiums—which have risen much higher than the tides—certainly suggest that someone, somewhere, still believes the wolf is coming. Yet here I am, decades later, still watching the tide roll in and out, still waiting for the biblical floods that were supposed to have arrived on my doorstep long ago.

This skepticism is what the AI doomers confront—enabled by a media that profits from exaggeration and a growing number of politicians, like Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, who have learned to use apocalyptic rhetoric for their own purposes. They may be right about the danger, but they are speaking to a society that has lost the capacity to judge the truth of their warnings. After the duplicitous pandemic messaging, after shifting climate deadlines and the promise rising tides that have pretty much disappeared now, after the crypto warnings, and after every technological revolution that promised collapse or salvation, we no longer trust these people anymore.

President Trump has completely dismissed the apocalyptic warnings—calling them part of a scam. Some are reassured by that—but most of us are not. Trump has claimed that the United States already has guardrails in place to regulate and prosecute AI companies, appearing to play down concerns by Elon Musk and other AI industry leaders about the misuse of artificial ‌intelligence harming people. We really cannot know for sure what to believe.

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, there is a long, reflective essay on Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century’s most important analysts of the forces that give rise to totalitarianism. The essay emphasized Arendt’s most important insight on the danger of pervasive lying by government officials. She warned that when the government tells lies, the real risk is not that citizens may begin to believe falsehoods but that they may lose the ability to believe anything at all. When government official narratives shift constantly, and when elite authorities rewrite their own narratives, repeatedly reversing their own public statements, people become confused and unable to judge what is real from what is false. They begin to become susceptible to whatever authority speaks most confidently in the moment.

There is likely a political motivation for the political prophets of doom. The Left has a clear incentive to amplify doomer narratives heading into the midterms because widespread pessimism depresses turnout, especially among right‑leaning and politically exhausted voters. It’s the same dynamic as the villagers who stopped responding to the boy’s cries. If you can convince people that the wolf is always at the door, you don’t need to tell them how to vote—you just need to get them to stay home.