Personal Oracle Bone · Filed September 10, 2026 · Judge December 31, 2030
Still Here
Matthew Langenkamp
Claim. By the end of 2030, humanity will still be here.
Falsifier. Humanity has become extinct by December 31, 2030.
The reading
I think the AI doomsday predictions are going to be wrong. By the end of 2030, humanity will still be here.
Things might not be much better or much worse. There will be useful inventions, disappointing products, fortunes made, jobs changed, and plenty of ordinary human foolishness. I expect neither extinction nor paradise. Mostly, I expect people to carry on.
This is a prediction, not a claim that AI is harmless. Humans will find ways to misuse it. But I remain unconvinced that increasingly capable machines will find it necessary to eliminate us.
The occasion
This personal bone followed a conversation with Thea about Matthew Berman’s “We need to talk about this…”, AI risk, and the distance between increasingly capable machines and the end of humanity. This is my call, not a prediction issued by the Court of Oracles.
The Jester’s counter
There is an awkward feature of this particular wager: if I am wrong, the complaints department may also be closed.
Return to the bone
Check on December 31, 2030: Is humanity still here? And has everyday life changed as dramatically—for better or worse—as today’s forecasts suggest?
The survival prediction is the scored claim. “Better or worse” is a question to revisit, not a precise measure. Survival through 2030 would contradict categorical extinction predictions with that deadline; it would not disprove longer-term risks or a forecast that assigned extinction only a small probability.
Status: Open. Verdict and retrospective to be recorded after the window closes.