For the last couple of years, I’ve written about a growing sense of concern about the trajectory of the world, in particular with regard to AI, politics, and climate. I finally decided to actually do something about it: I started a new Substack called Reasonable Panic that focuses on practical prepping.
You can check it out the Substack here. There’s also a stripped down site that I’ll be adding to over the course of the next couple of months: reasonablepanic.com.
Why I Think Prepping is a Good Idea
I’m a big fan of prepping (within reason) for 3 reasons:
It provides something to do with general anxiety. When people feel powerless about stuff in their environment, they get depressed. I won’t pretend that my prepping is going to actually make a difference, but it feels a hell of a lot better to be doing something than sitting around waiting for bad stuff to happen.
It’s good practice for stoicism. Stoicism is great, but it’s pretty hard to remind yourself to think about awful scenarios just so that you can appreciate eating a piece of bread. But that’s exactly what prepping encourages you to do. I find that it’s a way to make myself appreciate all the great stuff in the world. Running water! Electricity! Healthy family members! No violence! These are things worth appreciating and thinking about scenarios where they don’t (when done in moderation) can be a really healthy reality check.
It’s fun to solve survival problems. I think it’s actually interesting to think about how to store water or ensure my family has power if the grid goes down. To each there own, of course, but a lot of the systems that we depend on are actually pretty cool and learning how and why they work might amaze you. Then trying to recreate parts of them is an interesting challenge.
Why Prepping Makes Sense Now
All of that is well and good, but why have I chosen to go down this path now? Why not 2 years ago? Why not wait another 2 years?
The answer is everyone’s favorite subject: AI.
There were plenty of legitimate reasons to prep in the late 2010s. Nuclear war was still a possibility, there was a massive buildup of BSL3 and BSL4 labs that risked leaking a weaponized pathogen, climate change was accelerating, and the political order was destabilizing.
But even with all of those risks, I didn’t feel particularly compelled to start prepping because they were fairly slow-moving and we have some track record of preventing sudden, civilization-level problems from occuring.
For instance, we’ve nearly started a nuclear war several times in the last 100 years. That gives me some hope that cooler heads will prevail and that control systems might be robust enough to keep us mostly safe.
We’ve had bioweapons for thousands of years. Despite horrific accidents, we’ve never actually released superpox and killed off a 50% of humanity.
Climate change will take decades to become truly catastrophic for most people, and most people will have lots of ways to adapt.
Finally, we have millenia of experience dealing with dysfunctional political systems. Wars, pogroms, and
I don’t mean to brush these aside and conclude that they couldn’t ruin your life or mine in the coming decades. They’re all real and present dangers, but they aren’t unprecedented and their dynamics aren’t changing so fast that I’m worried we’ll get completely blindsided.
AI is unfortunately different. It’s evolving very fast, very unpredictably, and it acts as a force multiplier for all the rest of the risks.
Why AI Is a Risk Multiplier
Just in the last few years, AI models have gone from being hilariously inadequate at even rudimentary tasks to getting perfect scores on most standardized tests, replacing software engineers, and even making decisions about who the military will shoot at.
We’re at a point today where every leading edge AI model is smarter than at least 90% of humans. They’re also experts across most knowledge domains. They are capable of doing tasks in seconds or minutes that require days or weeks for humans to perform. AI is already affecting knowledge worker employment and is poised to be an unprecedented disruptor.
In all of the areas above, AI also introduces novel and unpredictable risk.
We know that military systems are already being connected to agentic systems en masse. We don’t know for sure, but it stands to reason that systems that process nuclear threat data and formulate responses have already been integrated with AI models. Human review of those systems will be imperfect for the foreseeable future and our ability to correctly interpret warnings synthesized by AI systems is nascent at best. What would our military do with an AI system warning them that Russia has launched ICBMs?
On the biological war front, AI is even more terrifying. It used to require huge amounts of resources to design weaponized pathogens. That’s now possible with a little understanding of how to install open weight models and a modest token budget. The systems that have prevented mysanthropic humans from destroying civilization are eroding much faster in this domain than we are able to predict and mitigate.
Climate change might be a bright spot here because AI could help us design new power systems and carbon sequestration, but those same models are also consuming astronomical amounts of electricity. Some of that is being generated with renewables, but a lot isn’t.
Finally, AI is already destabilizing governments and undermining social trust. With deep fake videos that are now indistinguishable from real life, it’s increasingly impossible for even smart, knowledgeable people to separate fact from fiction. Scammers are already able to imitate the voices of your loved ones to call you and request sensitive information. This is just the tip of the iceberg facing social cohesion.
Put together, I think the case for something really unpredictable and really bad occurring in the near future is high enough that it warrants spending some time and money prepping.
No Machine Gun Reviews
If you’re looking for machine gun buying guides and bunker building tips, you’re going to be sorely disappointed with Reasonable Panic.
I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about prepping at this point and I’ve concluded that not only are traditional prepping activities a waste of time and money, they foster a perverse sort of conspiratorial thinking.
Done correctly, prepping should be an activity that costs you a small amount of time and money and gives you a greater appreciation for the world that we live in. Prepping should not make you yearn for the end times so that everyone that thought you had a weird hobby is proven wrong.
Nobody wants the apocalypse to occur, me least of all. I have young kids, lots of family, and things I love about the world the way it is.
Those things are worth fighting for, and prepping is a way for ordinary people to fight that fight.