Of White Rabbits and Warnings: A Personal Journey Through Time, Humanity, and the Existential Risk of AI

I am Alice — a concerned citizen, yes, but more so a devotee of humanity’s messy, miraculous splendor. I write out of love — the kind that aches with the weight of possibility, the kind that fears what we stand to lose.

In my imaginings, the superintelligent White Rabbit stands for Time: Time we still have, Time we may soon no longer possess. It beckons us down a rabbit hole, not into a wonderland, but into the sobering depths of what it means to navigate an era in which our own creations might outrun us.

My journey into the labyrinth of AI and existential risk began in the most unlikely of places. I was born in 1977 in Marseille, France, into an apocalyptic cult called The Children of God — later rechristened as The Family International. This was no ordinary upbringing. As a child, we would venture beyond the confines of our compounds to busk on street corners, peddling a peculiar blend of doom and salvation to passersby. We sang songs about manners, heaven, Jesus, God’s love, sex, and the end of the world.

One of those songs has stayed with me. It was called “Watch Out for 666”:

In a vision of the future, I saw in a vivid dream,That the hour is soon coming when men will become machines.A new one-world order will rise and then demand,That all the world’s people receive a scientific brand.

I saw a tiny pre-programmed computer chip so thin,Implanted in men’s foreheads, underneath their skin,Linking to a server, to the system’s central brain,The master computer, that over them will reign.Watch out for 666!

It was the early 1980s. The idea of men becoming machines felt like a fantastical horror, a dystopian myth from the distant fringes of imagination. And yet, here we are, decades later, flirting with the precipice of that very possibility.

My second introduction to the existential implications of AI came years later, while studying Politics and International Relations at university. It was 2007. Smartphones were still a novelty, Facebook had barely emerged from the dorm room, and most homes didn’t even have computers.

One day, our Globalization professor stood at the front of the lecture hall, her expression grave. “There are three black boxes,” she said, “three existential risks to humanity.”

Nuclear war and pandemics were easy guesses — we yawned them out, half bored by their familiarity. But when she named the third, the room fell silent: Artificial Intelligence.

The statement jolted me awake. I hadn’t seen it coming. AI, to me, was still a distant abstraction — a curiosity of code and computation, a thing for mathematicians and engineers to tinker with. I wanted to know more, but life intervened, as it so often does.

In the years that followed, I stumbled through my own wild ride. After university, I ended up meeting my Dutch husband and moving from London to Amsterdam. Together with him, I began organizing festivals — a pursuit that suited my restless, creative spirit. For a time, my energies were consumed by other matters. Existential risks were far from my mind.

It wasn’t until 2017, with my life finally steady, that the subject of AI resurfaced. A TED Talk by Sam Harris reignited the spark of curiosity. I devoured Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence and the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky. I listened to Elon Musk’s chilling warnings about the intelligence explosion — the moment when AI surpasses human cognition and begins evolving beyond our control. I was hooked.

And yet, the deeper I delved, the more I encountered a disconcerting pattern: a failure of intuition. The idea that AI could end humanity sounds so absurd, so far-fetched, that even when laid out step by step, it eludes our grasp. The threat feels too big, too abstract, too surreal to take seriously.

I suffer from this failure, too. I study, I immerse, I feel the fear, the grief, the gratitude for the life I have today. And then I set it aside. Life has a way of doing that — pulling us back into the mundane, the manageable, the here and now.

But Time, that merciless Rabbit, will not wait. Today, the warnings are everywhere. The world’s top scientists and CEOs of AI labs — Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic — have sounded the alarm. The median estimate suggests humanity stands an 80% chance of surviving the advent of a superintelligence. For some, the odds are worse: 15% survival.

And yet, silence.

Why, with so much at stake, does the world carry on as if nothing is happening? Why do we scroll past dinner photos on social media while this epochal transformation unfolds in the background?

The answer, I suspect, lies in the very nature of the threat: it is distant yet imminent, abstract yet all-encompassing, too big for any one of us to tackle alone. But if we are to have a chance at aligning this new species we are creating with our own values, our own goals, we must first pause. We must collectively say: STOP.

This is not the end of the story, nor the beginning of it. It is simply my story — a breadcrumb on the trail of humanity’s reckoning with itself. My hope is that these words will reach someone, somewhere, who has yet to feel the weight of this moment.

For Time is the one thing we cannot create. And the Rabbit is still running.