17 Sep 2026 Wendell Berry and AI Apocalypse
Toward the end of last year and into the spring of this year I found myself reading a number of books that were written in the years prior to the start of World War II, as Hitler was gaining power. Among them were Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, which is a delightful memoir of his journey on foot from Holland to Constantinople in 1933 and 1934; W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland, a creative and hilarious “travel book” written in 1936 by two fairly unadventurous and extremely poetic friends from Oxford; and MacNeice’s masterful long poem from 1938, Autumn Journal.
Each of these works has in their own way a sort of dreamlike quality to it, as if to say, “here is a life to be lived, and yet, what is life about to become?”
The possibility of an AI apocalypse—at least in my likely naïve and possibly average brain—does not rise to the same level of existential threat that Hitler did. I am not saying we are headed toward World War III. But it strikes me that there is a similar dreamlike quality to walking through life in this present age with its wild headlines, such as the recent statement by the British researcher Jacob Coxin, who quit Anthropic after saying he “earnestly believe[d] that [AI] could kill us all by the end of the decade.” (By the way, he was pictured in the WSJ today wearing a vintage Bass Pro Shops hat, so I guess if things are apocalyptic you should still be out here serving looks, as the kids say.)
But even if we should take these mathematicians’ prophetic utterings with a grain of salt—they have a disconcerting habit of speaking in cataclysmic or euphoric tones by turn—it seems clear to me that the “world of AI” is leading us into a period of great change: good, bad, or otherwise. So what?
Wendell Berry, who died a couple weeks ago at the age of 92, was a man well-acquainted with “here is a life to be lived, and yet, what is life about to become?” You could make the case that his life’s work was trying to get us to more seriously grapple with both the here and now of our lives, and the consequences of our here and now decisions on an uncertain future.
Berry wrote and said much over the last several decades that we would do well to listen to, but if I had to pick one single idea to speak to this question of how we might maintain our humanity in the face of AI and its inexorable march toward who knows what, it would be a speech he made in 2012, and this paragraph in particular:
“For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”
I am no farmer, and no prophet, and of no real account in these big conversations. I have used AI and will continue to use it—hopefully as a helpful tool rather than the means of my own destruction—and I hope that in all things wisdom will prevail, though I often doubt the wisdom of technocrats.
But I want to grab on to Berry’s ideal here, and share it far and wide: In our modern world, to be at rest and content—yes, with our money as well as with the more important parts of life!—is to have an affection for place. Not simply your house, but the place in which you live, and the people that share that place with you. The natural beauty and uncanny provision of the earth on which you walk. The outdoor, unconditioned air that is starting to get cooler each morning. The real.
Financially, if you really believed with all your heart that AI was going to kill us, I suppose a rational thing to do would be to short the stock market (extremely not investment advice!!!!), and embrace a YOLO lifestyle of lavish consumption in the interim.
But if you are like me and tremendously uncertain about it all, I think a wiser course of action is to get our heads out of the terminally online clouds, and also out of the sand, and simply be in the place where we stand. Spend money on a big dinner in your home with friends. Stop at every kid-run lemonade stand you come across and give them a tenner. Give generously and without expectation. Avoid debt where you can, and save some for an uncertain future. Find work that you are good at, and do it as well as you can for your place.
And remember this, for this is how Berry closed his speech: “[T]his has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.” Because we aren’t!
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