AI AND END TIMES FASCISM

We have been warned by the very people building artificial intelligence (AI) that it could destroy humanity within a decade.  In their new book End Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor says that whoever wins the AI race will 'become so dominant in a range of fields that theirs will be one of only a handful of remaining companies in existence.' This is not simply capitalism in overdrive; it is capitalism mutating into something darker. 

LAST WEEK'S warnings about humanity standing on the brink of extinction did not come from a novelist, a screenwriter, or a conspiracy theorist. They came from Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher who walked away from one of the world’s most powerful AI labs because, in his words, the people building artificial intelligence believe it could destroy humanity. 

His resignation was not a symbolic gesture, but a flare fired into a darkening sky. 'They are gambling with our lives,' he said, describing superhuman systems capable of hacking anything, overriding any barrier, and operating beyond human control. When the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, responded by writing that the industry needed to 'slow down' and that within a year there could be 'a swarm of AI agents' effectively taking over the internet, it was hard not to feel that the line between science fiction and political reality had dissolved entirely.

For decades, the spectre of runaway AI has been safely contained within Hollywood’s imagination. Skynet, featured in the Terminator movies, was a metaphor, a narrative device, a warning wrapped in a blockbuster spectacle. It was never meant to be a policy briefing. Yet here we are, listening to the very people building these systems describe futures that sound indistinguishable from dystopian cinema. The difference is that this time the threat is not fictional, and the people sounding the alarm are not outsiders but insiders—engineers, researchers, executives—who understand the machinery from the inside out.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue in their new book End Times Fascism that capitalism has always been driven by high-stakes races to dominate the future. The railway, the steam engine, mass production, the internet—each revolution created new empires and new inequalities. But AI represents something qualitatively different: a technology capable not just of transforming production but of consolidating unprecedented power in the hands of a tiny elite. The men (and it is largely men) driving this race do not hide their ambitions. They speak openly about creating systems that will reshape every industry, every institution, every aspect of human life. Amodei himself has called AI the 'ultimate technology,' a phrase that should chill rather than inspire.

Klein and Taylor capture the stakes with brutal clarity: 'Whoever wins this race will become so dominant in a range of fields that theirs will be one of only a handful of remaining companies in existence.' 

In other words, the endgame is not competition but monopoly. Not innovation but domination. And because the prize is so colossal, democratic deliberation becomes an inconvenience. Regulation becomes a threat. Public oversight becomes an obstacle. The race must continue at full speed, even as the risks multiply, even as insiders warn of catastrophic outcomes, even as the technology accelerates beyond the capacity of governments to understand, let alone control.

This is not simply capitalism in overdrive; it is capitalism mutating into something darker. Klein and Taylor call it 'fascism with a difference'—a political economy that welcomes catastrophe because catastrophe clears the field for the winners. It is a worldview that sees no value in the natural world, no meaning in democratic institutions, no future worth protecting. 

Naomi Klein is blunt: 'There is something so profound about no longer believing in the future. They’re traitors to creation.' That phrase lands with the force of moral indictment. It names what many people feel but struggle to articulate: that the leaders of the AI race are not merely reckless but nihilistic, willing to gamble the stability of civilisation for the chance to stand atop its ruins.

And while these debates may seem distant from New Zealand, they are not. Listen to certain politicians praising the construction of a massive, energy-hungry data centre in rural Southland as if it is a monument to progress. Hear them talk about 'growth' as if the word itself were a spell capable of warding off ecological collapse. Watch them wave away concerns about emissions, water use, land degradation, and energy demand as if these were trivial obstacles rather than existential threats. The rhetoric is familiar: growth at any cost, innovation without scrutiny, technology as salvation, consequences be damned. It is the same logic that drives the AI arms race, scaled down but no less destructive.

New Zealand likes to imagine itself as a haven, a place insulated from global turmoil. But the political embrace of data-centre capitalism—energy-intensive, extractive, and indifferent to environmental limits—suggests that we are not outside the orbit of end times fascism but drifting toward its fringes. When leaders celebrate infrastructure that accelerates ecological strain while dismissing warnings from scientists, communities, and environmental advocates, they are participating in the same worldview that Klein and Taylor describe: a worldview that no longer believes in the future, that treats the natural world as expendable, and that sees democratic oversight as an impediment to profit.

The AI crisis is not separate from the climate crisis, the inequality crisis, or the crisis of democratic erosion. They are different expressions of the same underlying pathology: a system that rewards speed over safety, profit over survival, and elite power over collective wellbeing. Coxon’s resignation is a reminder that the people closest to the machinery are terrified. The question is whether the rest of us will recognise the warning before the machinery becomes unstoppable.

New Zealand cannot afford to sleepwalk into this future. The stakes are not abstract. They are material, ecological, democratic. If we continue to treat technological expansion as inherently virtuous and economic growth as inherently necessary, we will find ourselves complicit in a system that is not merely unsustainable but actively hostile to human survival. The end times are not a metaphor. They are a trajectory. And unless we confront the political and economic forces driving that trajectory, we may discover too late that the future has already been stolen.