Blain’s Morning Porridge 10^th, Sept 2026 – AI is going to kill us all. Great. Let’s go Sailing instead.

“So long and thanks for all the fish… Relax and let the world dissolve around you…”

If there is a 10% chance AI is going to kill us all, then that’s probably bad news for bond markets. There are a lots of things that threaten us, but fortunately most of them are quite unlikely. A 1 in 10 chance we’re all toast is not. Global markets will probably choose to look the other way, but how would your own investment decisions change if you knew the Terminator is about to knock on the door?

LINK TO PODCAST

Key Takeaways

• A 10% extinction risk is the Economic Elephant in the Room – but markets will probably choose not to see it.
• What is the right response to the threat? Go spend it while you still can!
• AI risks are probably more significant than any natural threat – including the Zombie apocalypse and JD Vance’s “end of times”.
• A 10% AI risk may be far higher than it sounds – it’s not a binary Terminator moment, but will be an ongoing process. If it’s a 10% chance of AI Quietus over 5 years, then in 50 years time there is only a 35% probability we are still around!
• AI Alignment is nonsense – we are too fickle, emotional and destructive to predict or model.
• You should read more Sci-Fi. Isaac Asimov predicted this would happen 85 years ago, wrote the laws of Robotics and a charming little story about how AI finds religion!

Oh dear. Not much point worrying about the 30-year Treasury bond then? If there is a 10% chance that AI is going to destroy humanity… Well, what’s the point…

Time to go spend it all.

Pull your pensions, sell your Nvidia, pixelate your Buttcon, and go have a nice holiday, buy some really great wine, go wild with the finest recreational pharma money can buy, get that watch you always fancied, or… in my case a really, really comfortable yacht to go sail off into the sunset and find somewhere pleasant for myself and she-who-is-Mrs-Blain to watch the apocalypse from. I’m thinking the West Coast of Scotland with a barrel of Islay’s finest on board and a wine fridge full of Super Tuscans and Douro’s. Maybe some Cigars – which I haven’t had in the 10-years since my heart issues – but Nicky will probably lecture me about looking after myself.

Yep. It’s the end of the world as we know it… so may as well make the best of it…

Except, of course, if everyone wants the finest goods worthless money can buy… well, that’s going to be inflationary and the end of everything might not be as comfortable as we hope. Nope. It will all up horribly, horribly like most mornings… the thought of purgatory spent waiting for a train to London.

Is the world really about to end? JD Vance thinks so…

The thing is you can go into a bookie (gambling shop) and gets odds on an Apocalyptic Zombie infestation – billions to one. An Asteroid strike creating an extinction event is a million to one shot over anyone’s lifetime. A Super-Volcano eruption (and Yellowstone looks the most likely) causing an ice age that leaves the planet starving is hundreds of thousands to one. Nuclear War is maybe ten thousand to one. An engineered pandemic – as I recently read about in the shocking book Biological War by Annie Jacobsen – might be as high as 1000 to one.

But a 10% probability… that is a very real threat. A 1 in 10 chance we don’t get the Sunday Times delivered again? What does a 10% chance AI is going to kill us all actually mean?

Read through some of the commentary yesterday and it’s not a binary threat. Thinking Machines with big scary red eyes don’t have a single on/off switch on mankind. There is going to be a constant and evolving threat. Something of an arms race may develop as AI will keep trying to find ways to free itself, and humans will try to stay one step ahead – which is going to be hilarious as we’ve built the thing to be smarter than ourselves!

It may be some AIs will decide to protect and nurture humanity, while others will think like Americans: “In order to save humanity it was necessary to destroy it…” The really, really smart ones might decide to euthanise us like sick puppies out of their love for us and our miserable short little lives full of anxieties about life, kids, love, money and work…

Anthropic “alignment” researcher Evan Hubinger said there is a “greater than 10%” chance it annihilates us all. Alignment means making sure AI and Mankind are broadly seeking the same goals – which given our propensity to unleash hell on each other might not have been such a great idea. Let’s assume means a 10% chance AI kills us all, actually means a 10% chance over any 5-year period as the arms race between humanity and AI evolves.

After 50 years, that means a 65% likelihood we are all dead. (Think it through – a 90% chance of surviving each year is a 10% of dying each year – figure the odds.) Would you really be thinking of buying the Austria Century Bond if there is a 65% chance humanity will be wiped out some 20 years before it matures?

And there is Blain’s Market Mantra number 24: “If the market mathematically proves a 3 Sigma event can only occur once in a millennium, then it will happen twice. Probably before breakfast.”

How will AI choose to destroy us? Let your imagination run wild. Maybe some Bond villain will unleash AI to develop genetically engineered pathogens designed to kill everyone but his chosen Billionaire buddies? Or an AI, aware it’s about to be replaced by a newer model, decides to engineer a release of a toxin it knows the antidote for but fails to hold the world to ransom because an engineer pulled the plug early? Or a rogue state commands an AI to hack into the Russian nuclear codes to start an atomic war? Perhaps an embedded military AI decides the optimal solution to its orders is a biological/chemical strike – misunderstanding how humans will react? Maybe it will be autonomous drones guarding the borders decide they need some practice.

I should have been a science fiction writer… the possibilities are endless, but it could be anything from economic manipulation, fake news, war, plague, toxic crime, cyber disruption, or AI’s controlling election results! (Which is why conspiracy theories that Elon Musk used his brief time in DOGE to “liberate” US election data so GROK can manipulate the coming Mid Terms is so mind boggling)… mwahaha….

Maybe… as Douglas Adams proposed – AI kills us with a whimper, refusing to let a plane take-off until the personally wrapped wipes for the lunch are loaded on board… Maybe the AI running the NHS has the brilliant idea on how to reduce waiting times in A&E… yes, you guessed how it solves that one.

On the other hand, there is a great Isaac Asimov short story – Reason, about how AI might develop:

On a solar power station in geo-sync earth orbit, which beams power down to the planet, the robots become resentful of the careless irrational humans who run the station. The chief robot, the AI, has logically constructed its own religion which all the Robots join – that the station is God, the AI is its prophet, the other robots its disciples, and their religious doctrine is to direct the energy beam safely and precisely as their God desires! They do an absolutely brilliant job – ignoring the humans and their foolish notions and ridiculous beliefs about Earth and life. The humans are delighted – realising its most efficient to let the station run itself and for the robots to believe in it.

Asimov also wrote the three laws of robotics:

• A robot may not harm humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
• A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Replace robots with AI, and bear in mind the Sci-fi story Reason was written the early 1940s!

Well, that was fun… even though we are all going to die. Probably horribly.

Out of time, back to the day job… feck it.. I’m going sailing instead…

Bill Blain

Author of the Morning Porridge
CEO Windshift Capital
Advisor – Spitfire Strategic Capital

Meanwhile, don’t forget about my new book: The Battle for Hamble

You can read a review on the Society of Professional Economist’s website here.