Apparently, AI is going to kill us: How to cope with modern uncertainty.

Apparently AI might wipe us all out within the next decade.

I discovered this deeply concerning news last Monday morning while I was answering some emails and probably thinking about something else, like what we were going to have for dinner, which feels like quite an accurate summary of what it’s like to be alive in 2026. We’re all going to die! Email, email, email. Oooh, maybe garlicky courgettes. THE ROBOTS ARE TAKING OVER.

A few clients have brought it up this week too, which is what made me actually go and read about it properly. It seems that the usual stuff about AI taking our jobs or whether we’re all slowly outsourcing our brains feels pretty mild in comparison, because we’ve now ramped right up to actual human extinction. Good lord.

There are people working in AI who are seriously worried about where this is all heading, and there are other people who think the predictions are completely overblown. I have absolutely no idea who is right. I am just a coach splitting my time between Cheshire in the UK and our little farm in Germany. I don’t understand what cryptocurrency or The Cloud is, or why the printer says it’s offline when it is VERY CLEARLY ON.

But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it all… not really because of AI itself, but because I keep wondering, how the bloody hell are we supposed to process this stuff and then just carry on with our day?

We already have wars, climate change, Trump, the cost of living, increasingly mad weather and all the other things going on in the world that we’re trying to make sense of. We can read about something horrific happening on the other side of the world while making some toast, then watch a funny video of a dog, then read that AI might kill us all, then realise we haven’t put the recycling bin out.

It is a LOT, isn’t it?

And I think this is partly what my clients have been bringing into their sessions with me this week. Not necessarily, “Liz, please explain the future of artificial intelligence to me”, thankfully, because that would be a very disappointing use of their money. It’s more: how am I supposed to plan my life when the future feels this uncertain?

And actually, I hear versions of that question all the time, even without AI being thrown into the mix. Stuff like what if I lose my job? What if I leave and regret it? What if I stay and regret it? What if something happens to my kids? What if I make the wrong decision? What if everything goes horribly wrong?

Our brains bloody love a what if.

Mine does too. I can worry about something that hasn’t happened with such commitment that my body seems to think we’re already there. And there is something particularly difficult about living now, when we have access to SO MANY possible things to worry about. Human beings have always lived with uncertainty, but I’m not sure we were designed to know quite this much about it.

I don’t think the answer is to ignore what’s happening. Some things are frightening because they genuinely are frightening, and I think there are very serious questions to be asked about AI and who is controlling where all of this goes.

But I’m also not sure I want to spend the rest of 2026 worrying about whether I’ll still be here in 2036.

Because I am here now. It’s September, my favourite month. The mornings are getting colder, I can wear jumpers again, Nanook, my amazing little dude of a dog, wants his walk, and my son will inevitably ask for more screen time and I will probably give in and then feel like a terrible parent. My life is full of people I love, work I care about, and things I still really want to do.

I suppose that’s the bit I’m trying to hold onto. The frightening stuff is real, but this is real too.

We have never actually known what is coming next. I think maybe what’s different now is that we have a small device in our pockets telling us, in great detail and all the time, about every single terrible thing that is happening or might happen. And I’m just not convinced our brains know what to do with that.

I don’t really have a clever or wise answer to any of this. I don’t know what’s going to happen with AI, or climate change, or the world generally. None of us do. But I do know that I don’t want to spend so much time worrying about a future I can’t predict that I forget I’m actually living a life now.

So that’s what I’m thinking about this week. How to care about what’s happening, pay attention to the things that matter, and still somehow get on with being a person in the middle of it all.

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