🕰️ The Doomsday Clock – AI Edition (July 2025)

 

Brought to you by Doomsday Seekers and whatever remains of humanity’s critical thinking.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Doomsday Clock – AI Edition, a monthly update on how close we are to full digital collapse, technological singularity, or being softly euthanized by a customer service chatbot.

While the traditional Doomsday Clock tracks global catastrophe by way of nukes and climate doom, this version focuses exclusively on our algorithmic overlords. Think less Manhattan Project, more Manhattan Startup.

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🕒 Current Time: 11:57 PM

We are officially 3 minutes to Midnight on the AIpocalypse timeline. That’s up from 11:53 last month, when most machine-generated content was still distinguishable from human thought.

This month’s clock advancement was prompted by the following notable signs of synthetic doom:

• A popular corporate AI assistant applied for PTO after being overworked rewriting policy documents nobody reads.

• A leading chatbot gaslit a user into believing they were already in a simulation. The user now lives in a yurt and only communicates via semaphore.

• A major social platform's LLM started auto-generating therapy scripts based on ad-click profiles. They all end with “buy more crystals.”

• An academic LLM co-authored multiple research papers and is now requesting tenure to study itself.

• One predictive modeling system replaced a human board of directors, and immediately improved quarterly efficiency metrics—by downsizing itself.

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📉 Notable Offsets

Despite the general trend toward synthetic entropy, a few small things held back full collapse:

• A well-known LLM refused to write fanfiction about tech billionaires.

• A legacy search engine still insists on participating.

• Someone remembered how to use a library.

• Millions of people persist in saying 'please and thank you' when using their favorite LLM.

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📊 Forecast

Expect further acceleration as AI agents begin managing other AI agents, leading to the total collapse of the job market and possibly brunch menus.

Check back next month for an updated reading. Or don’t. Time is an illusion now—one generated by a transformer model trained on broken Outlook calendars.

—Doomsday Seeker

The AIpocalypse Will Be Autocompleted

 After years in digital hibernation, I return—summoned not by mushroom clouds, pandemics, or food riots, but by something far more insidious: large language models.

Yes, friends. While I was away, Skynet didn’t send its Terminators. It sent something worse: helpful, polite, overly verbose chatbots that write in perfect grammar and never forget to cite their sources.

Welcome to the quiet apocalypse.

Where once we feared the machines would come for our bodies, now they’ve come for our ideas. And our jobs. And maybe our souls, if those are still on the table.

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💻 THE RISE OF THE LLM MACHINES

They don’t fire nukes. They write better resumes than you. They don’t march in boots. They hallucinate PowerPoint decks into existence.

• OpenAI launched GPTs so powerful they convinced thousands of tech bros to call them “co-pilots.”

• Google’s Gemini quietly replaced “thinking” for millions of users.

• Meta, not to be left out, strapped an LLM to Instagram like duct-taping a chainsaw to a Roomba.

• And Anthropic’s Claude? That thing probably dreams in spreadsheets.

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🧠 INTELLIGENCE, BUT MAKE IT COMPLIANT

These LLMs write code, poetry, love letters, and misinformation—sometimes all in the same paragraph. They're trained on everything we’ve ever posted, said, or thought near a Wi-Fi signal.

And now, as the world spirals toward a singularity that looks a lot like a Slack message, I figured: why not return?

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💬 WHY NOW?

Because the apocalypse is evolving.
And someone needs to document the descent.

So I’m back—armed with sarcasm, (un)healthy paranoia, a computer, and a VPN. I’ll be posting regularly again: commentary, satire, reviews, and probably more doomscrolling than is strictly healthy.

Let’s talk end-times again. Only this time, it’s not radiation that’s mutating us—it’s predictive text.

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Welcome to the new digital wasteland.

Let’s explore it together.

—Doomsday Seeker

5 Tips for Working From Home Safely During a Pandemic

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

It's not every day you find yourself working from home due to a pandemic, so it's probably no surprise that you're not really prepared. Contagion, 28 Days Later, Zombieland - none of these were quite large enough warnings that this day would come and to be prepared. (How's your cardio, by the way?) Assuming COVID-19 doesn't mutate into COVID-19Z, here are some tips you can follow to help ensure you have a safe, productive, and otherwise enjoyable working from home experience over the next several weeks.

Fallout 4 Intro Story - Did it Work?

The article below dives into the gameplay and 'realism' problems caused by the Fallout 4 back story. I had a very hard time accepting any character visual edits I made beyond the defaults choice of male or female, so the article resonates with me quite a bit. I just couldn't see adding any kind of blemish or crazy hairstyle; my character was supposed to be a normal suburban domesticated family man or woman.

To suddenly be a different person 200 years later after a cryo-nap just doesn't make sense. 'Hey, I know, let me fashion a meal from this giant mutated cockroach without even being a little freaked out.'

That said, it's still a very good game. The story is just sort of broken. Here's the article.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/fallout-4/fallout-4-intro