2030: The Last Chance. Why Superhuman ai could save humanity

Prologue

History never happens “suddenly,” nor does it recognize such a thing as “chance.”

It was no accident that on June 28, 1914, shots rang out in Sarajevo, ending the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

From that day on, events unfolded like an avalanche rushing down a mountain: on July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. During the month of August alone, Russia, Germany, France, Belgium, Great Britain, and Japan were drawn into the conflict. Later the list of participants expanded to include the Ottoman Empire, Montenegro, Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania.

The rest of the story is well known: four years of war that claimed roughly 40 million lives.

Hardly had the final artillery shots faded when historians began sharpening their pens. Between 1918 and 1935, they published more than 300 books and 1,000 articles devoted to the First World War as a whole, including its causes, course, and consequences.

All of them agreed on one point: the war was the result of a long accumulation of contradictions among the great powers, a combination of imperial ambition, bloc logic, militarism, and failed diplomacy in a moment of crisis.

In their works, they laid out the elements of those contradictions: Germany’s drive to redistribute colonies and spheres of influence, the struggle for power in the Balkans, rivalry over control of the Black Sea straits and Ottoman territories — and so on, always in the same vein and in the same direction. Researchers write of a “Gordian knot of contradictions” that could not have been cut any other way.

The historians are right in their facts, but wrong in their understanding of the deeper causes. So let us thank them for their diligent and useful studies of the surface causes, and then dive deeper ourselves.

The true causes of this war — and of all other wars — reveal themselves only when we plunge back to the very beginning of human history.

If we approach that “beginning” from the biblical perspective, we find ourselves in the interval between 3874 and 3800 BC, watching Cain kill Abel.

If we take the scientific account of human development as our starting point, we descend roughly 315,000 years into the past and witness one Homo sapiens pick up a stone for the first time in order to crush the skull of another.

If that is so, then the root of future wars must be sought not in treaties and borders, but in the very structure of man.

To understand how humanity arrived at the point from which nuclear apocalypse is already clearly visible, we must trace the entire path — from cave fights over the best cuts of mammoth meat to the button labeled launch. Because in essence nothing has changed; only the scale and the scenery are different. And the button marked launch is merely a modern stone in the hand.

A World That Has Come Too Close to the Edge

Since the taboo against talking openly about the possibility of nuclear war was lifted, hardly a lazy blogger has failed to weigh in on the danger. And since there are few lazy bloggers, the entire blogosphere is now saturated with military themes.

If the matter were confined to posts by frightened bloggers, perhaps there would be less reason to worry. But when the discussion begins to include the voices of authoritative figures — politicians, major business leaders, scientists, and artists — the matter takes on an entirely different character. Ordinary people always feel that if a source of information stands high on the social ladder, it knows more about the real state of affairs. And if such a person not only remains silent no longer but begins to speak openly, then things must be truly bad.

So what, exactly, have ordinary people been hearing recently from authoritative voices? Let us begin with a figure known throughout the world: UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

Everywhere he has taken the podium, one hears the same warning: that the risk of nuclear war has risen to its highest level, and that “the nuclear option is not an option at all. It is a one-way road to annihilation.”

The United Nations, created in 1945, had one central purpose: to prevent new world wars. But its predecessor, the League of Nations, failed — and the Second World War began. Nonaggression treaties signed on the eve of catastrophe did not stop it.

Historians say that the experience of the League of Nations was taken into account when the UN was created. Five permanent members of the Security Council were given the right of veto. But it was precisely the veto that repeatedly paralyzed the Council whenever a conflict touched the interests of the great powers.

The UN has been transformed from an instrument of peace into a platform for political games. More and more politicians speak openly of its uselessness. In February 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from a number of UN organizations, calling them “bloated, poorly managed, and ineffective.” It is hard to disagree.

Let us now see what other authoritative figures are saying about the situation that has taken shape in the world.

Nuclear scientists warn that the world is moving onto increasingly dangerous nuclear ground, and that 2025 brought no encouraging developments in the field of nuclear security. They stress that military operations in several regions are unfolding under the shadow of nuclear weapons, and that the risk of escalation is growing.

U.S. military experts at the DIA also acknowledge that the risk of nuclear escalation is rising faster than at any point in recent decades.

No one in the world, presumably, wants to unleash a Third World War. And yet the principle “If you want peace, prepare for war” sits firmly in the minds of many politicians. It is no accident that in recent public discussions of war the name of the famous nineteenth-century Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz has resurfaced again and again. Clausewitz, author of the treatise Vom Kriege (On War), studied some 130 military campaigns, focusing especially on the wars of the previous 150 years, and above all on the Napoleonic era. He concluded that war is a natural instrument of state policy whenever diplomacy fails to achieve its ends.2

When Clausewitz formulated his famous maxim—“War is the continuation of politics by other means”—he could hardly have imagined that this thought would become not merely a theoretical definition, but a psychological code that Europe would carry within itself for decades.3

In the nineteenth century, Clausewitz’s idea became the foundation of a new military culture in which war was perceived not as tragedy, but as a natural, almost inevitable stage of political development.

Prussian generals spoke of war as “the normal condition of Europe,” and of peace as merely a temporary pause between campaigns. Thus an analytical formula was transformed into a norm of behavior, and in the twentieth century that norm became part of the continent’s collective consciousness.

The European powers, armed with the idea that war was simply “another language of politics,” began to act as though that language were inevitable.

This is how one might describe the cycle of actions that preceded the Second World War: the mobilization of one country became an argument for the mobilization of another; the fortification of borders was perceived as a sign of hostility. And if one country entered into an alliance with another, that served as a signal of threat to their neighbors.

Thus arose a “spiral of expectations,” in which Clausewitz’s idea functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Therein lies the tragic paradox of European history: a thought born as an attempt to understand war became the matrix through which war reproduced itself.

Clausewitz did not call for war — he described it.

But Europe heard in his words not a description, but a guide to action.

Today, when politicians once again speak of the “inevitability of conflict,” when defense ministers name specific years by which their countries must become “combat-ready,” we can see that old mechanism coming back to life. Clausewitz’s thought is once again turning into prophecy — not because it is true, but because people believe it.

The leading European politicians speak regularly about the risk of a new war and the need to be prepared for it by 2030.

Listening to some of Europe’s leaders today, one cannot help recalling Marcus Porcius Cato the Elder (234—149 BC), known as Cato the Censor — a figure whose political career and rhetoric became a vivid example of how a deep conviction in the existence of an existential threat can turn into an obsession, and then into a real war.

Cato entered history because he ended virtually every speech in the Roman Senate — regardless of its subject — with the same phrase: Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam (“Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed”). It was precisely this relentless repetition that made the phrase proverbial and turned it into a symbol of the persistent, almost manic drive to destroy an enemy.

After the Second Punic War (218—201 BC), Carthage had been defeated, stripped of its fleet, most of its territory, and its army. It was obliged to pay enormous indemnities to Rome and could not wage war without the permission of the Roman Senate. Yet by the middle of the second century BC the city had recovered economically: trade had revived, agriculture had flourished, and visible prosperity had returned.

In 157 BC, Cato visited Carthage as part of a Roman commission and was stunned by its prosperity. That visit became the catalyst. Cato concluded that a recovering Carthage represented a mortal danger to Roman dominance in the western Mediterranean.

That position ultimately led to the Third Punic War (149—146 BC), in the course of which Carthage was completely destroyed and its territory turned into a Roman province.

Cato’s repeated phrase is an early example of a self-fulfilling prophecy in politics. By constantly reminding the Senate of the “threat of Carthage,” he gradually shifted public opinion and the Overton window: what first seemed excessive became normal, and then became necessary. In the end, Rome obtained the war it had itself provoked.

In the nuclear age, we see similar mechanisms at work: the constant repetition of a narrative about the “inevitable threat” posed by another state can move conflict from the hypothetical realm into the real one.

Against this background, all the leading global players are intensifying their military and technological programs, increasing the number of military exercises and expanding defense spending.

But one thing is well known: the more resources are pumped into the war machine, the more powerfully the old mechanism that political scientists call the “security dilemma” begins to operate. One country increases spending “for defense”; its neighbor sees a threat in that and responds in kind; then a third, a fourth, and a fifth join in. That is how an arms race is born — a race in which no one wants war, but everyone is preparing for it.

And in this picture we can see the same “spiral of expectations” already described above, the one that unfolded on the eve of the Second World War.

There is yet another influential source of End-of-the-World fear: the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic project that visualizes the level of global danger created by human activity.

The project was founded in 1947 by the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the onset of the Cold War. Midnight on this clock symbolizes nuclear apocalypse.

The decision to move the hands is made annually by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, which includes physicists, climatologists, and experts in cybersecurity who assess global threats.

The Board in turn consults with the Board of Sponsors, which includes Nobel laureates and other distinguished scientists.

Initially, the experts discussed only apocalyptic risks connected with nuclear testing. In 2007, they concluded that climate change had become a key factor on a par with the nuclear threat. Beginning in 2010, cyberthreats, biosecurity, artificial intelligence, and disinformation undermining global cooperation were added to the list of risks.

The process of moving the hands is rigorous and scientifically grounded, and for that very reason it has a powerful effect on public consciousness. The result is announced publicly each January. The clock is not moved automatically: the hands may be left where they are, moved forward closer to midnight, or moved back farther from it.