The sky has never been falling. Yet here we are again, watching a new generation of prognosticators prophecy civilizational collapse while evidence of human adaptability and economic dynamism surrounds them. Salon’s recent piece about “swarms of AI bots threatening democracy” epitomizes this tiresome pattern—a sensational claim dressed up in legitimate-sounding language that dissolves upon even cursory examination. The AI doomsayers have become the Chicken Littles of our era, and we should treat their warnings with the skepticism they deserve.

Let me be direct: artificial intelligence is a force multiplier. It amplifies human capability—both productive and destructive. This is neither apocalyptic nor utopian; it is simply true, and it is manageable. The mistake the doomsayers make is treating this amplification as equivalent to replacement, as though the emergence of more powerful tools somehow means humans cease to be relevant. This has never happened before, and there is no compelling reason to believe it happens now.

The Salon Narrative and Its Discontents

The Salon article warns breathlessly that AI bot swarms threaten the very foundations of democracy. The piece conjures images of coordinated autonomous agents flooding social media with disinformation, fabricating consensus, and rendering human discourse meaningless. It’s a vivid picture, and it’s also fundamentally incomplete.

Yes, malicious actors will exploit AI’s amplifying power to create better disinformation. This is serious and deserves policy attention. But the article suggests this represents an existential threat to democratic institutions themselves—an overwhelming force against which we are helpless. This betrays a staggering lack of imagination about human responses to technological change. When printing presses flooded Renaissance Europe with texts, societies adapted by developing literacy, criticism, and institutional responses to information abundance. When television became a mass medium, democratic systems adjusted their communication strategies. When the internet emerged, democracies developed new legal and social frameworks.

The presence of powerful tools doesn’t destroy democratic resilience; it tests it. And tested systems improve. To suggest otherwise is to imply that humans have somehow lost the adaptive capacity that has defined our species throughout history.

The Productivity Paradox and Job Creation

The economic doomsayers are equally misguided, though their mistake is even more glaring because we have centuries of evidence contradicting their thesis. They point to AI’s capacity to automate tasks and conclude that jobs must vanish. They see a sophisticated language model and imagine an unemployment apocalypse. They are, in short, making the same argument that was made about the mechanical loom, the steam engine, the automobile assembly line, and the microchip.

Each time they were wrong.

Consider the printing press. When Gutenberg’s innovation began to spread, scribes watched their profession face existential threat. In 1480, Swiss scholars petitioned monarchs to regulate printing, warning of a “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” German intellectuals lamented that they couldn’t keep pace with the flood of new material. The scribes were right that their work would change. They were catastrophically wrong about what would follow. Mass literacy created the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the democratization of knowledge. The number of jobs created by printing’s economic effects—in publishing, education, administration, research, and dozens of industries that didn’t exist before—dwarfed the scribe positions that disappeared. Societies didn’t collapse; they flourished.

The internal combustion engine triggered similar panic. Millions of people worked with horses—farriers, stable hands, feed suppliers, teamsters. The automobile would obliterate all those jobs. And yet, the automobile industry created employment at a scale that made those displaced horse-related professions seem quaint. Not only that, but the entire infrastructure of modernity—gas stations, repair shops, driving schools, traffic enforcement, hotels, and restaurants along highways—emerged from that technological revolution. The total number of jobs increased, and the average quality of work improved.

Fast forward to the transistor and the computer revolution. Forty years ago, serious economists predicted that automation would render vast swaths of the population unemployable. Instead, the digital revolution created industries that couldn’t have been imagined in 1970. Software engineering didn’t exist. Web design, digital marketing, data analysis, cybersecurity, content creation—none of these job categories existed before the technology that supposedly would make work obsolete. The US added tens of millions of jobs even as productivity skyrocketed through computerization.

Why would AI be different? There is no coherent answer, only assertion dressed up as analysis.

The Force Multiplier Reality

What AI does is amplify what humans can accomplish. A competent worker armed with AI tools produces vastly more value than that same worker without them. This increases overall economic productivity, which historically leads to economic expansion, which creates new jobs and new industries. The economist David Autor has documented that approximately 60% of jobs in the United States today didn’t exist in 1940. This wasn’t despite technological progress; it was because of it.

Admittedly, AI also amplifies destructive capacity. Bad actors with AI tools are more dangerous than bad actors without them. But this is an argument for thoughtful governance of dangerous technologies, not for halting innovation wholesale. We don’t ban automobiles because they enable crime; we develop law enforcement responses. We don’t ban the internet because it spreads falsehoods; we invest in media literacy and develop tools to identify misinformation. We can do the same with AI.

The doomsayers conflate “AI is powerful and requires careful management” with “AI will inevitably destroy us.” These are not equivalent propositions. One calls for wisdom and foresight; the other demands surrender to inevitability. Societies have managed the consequences of revolutionary technologies before, and there is no evidence we’ve somehow become incapable of doing so now.

The Pattern Nobody Wants to See

What unites the printing press, the steam engine, the automobile, and the computer is this: each one triggered genuine disruption and displacement, each one generated real hardship for workers in affected industries, and each one ultimately expanded human economic opportunity and aggregate employment to levels that made the original displacement seem almost trivial in retrospect. The transition periods were messy. Workers suffered. Societies adapted imperfectly. But the apocalypse never came.

This is not because these technologies were inevitably benevolent. It’s because humans are adaptable, markets adjust, and new possibilities open up in ways we can’t predict in advance. Our great-grandparents couldn’t have imagined the professions that employ millions today. We similarly cannot imagine the jobs that AI will ultimately create, but betting against that creativity emerging seems like a losing wager backed by historical ignorance.

The Salon piece and its ilk present themselves as serious warnings about genuine risks. In some respects, they identify real challenges—disinformation is real, labor displacement is real, security risks are real. But serious analysis of real risks doesn’t require abandonment of reason or historical perspective. It requires measured policy responses, investment in worker transition, and robust governance frameworks. It doesn’t require panic.

The AI doomsayers are Chicken Littles because they’re not actually offering solutions proportionate to the problems they identify. They’re offering existential despair. They’ve convinced themselves that we’re uniquely vulnerable, that this time truly is different, that the patterns of human adaptation that have defined our history no longer apply. History suggests they’re wrong.

We should listen to their warnings about specific harms, take them seriously, and then dismiss their apocalyptic conclusions. Build better governance. Invest in education and transition support. Amplify human capability with these powerful tools. And trust that human ingenuity, which has met every previous challenge posed by technological revolution, will meet this one too.

The sky isn’t falling. It never does.