What if the so–called “AI doomers” are right? Watch Nathan Mladin’s research seminar for The Faraday Institute. 10/03/2026

What if the so–called “AI doomers” are right, just not in the way they imagine?

In this lecture at The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Dr Nathan Mladin suggests AI existential risk discourse is best read as a form of secular apocalyptic literature, and argues that the deeper threat it unveils is anthropological: AI is entrenching a diminished, shrunken view of what it means to be human. We expect more and more of machines and think less and less of ourselves – anthropological pessimism and idolatrous faith in technology feeding off each other in a condition he calls “techno–nihilism”. Reclaiming richer visions of what it means to be human, and to flourish, he argues, is now an urgent task.

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