Is AI a sign of the end times?

Cold open

Daniel: October twenty-second, 1844. Upstate New York. Thousands of people are sure — absolutely sure — that Jesus is coming back that day. Some of them didn't bother to harvest their fields. Why would you? And they wait. Sunset comes. Midnight comes.

Adaeze: And nothing.

Daniel: And nothing. A farmer named Hiram Edson wrote down what that night felt like. "Such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before... We wept, and wept, till the day dawn."

Adaeze: It's one of the saddest sentences in American religious history.

Daniel: And here's why I'm telling it. This month, a famous evangelist went viral saying artificial intelligence is a sign the end is near. And at the same time — and this is the part nobody expects — some of the loudest end-of-the-world voices on Earth aren't preachers at all. They're the people BUILDING the AI.

Adaeze: Which is my whole career, honestly. I study people who think the world is ending. Business has never been better.

Daniel: I'm Daniel Voss. Joined by historian of religion Dr. Adaeze Nwosu, this is Episode 18: No One Knows the Hour.

What Jesus Actually Said

Daniel: Okay. Before we get to robots, I want to put the actual text on the table, because I think most people have only heard the scary parts. Matthew twenty-four. Jesus is walking out of the temple, and his disciples are going, look at these buildings, these stones —

Adaeze: The tourists.

Daniel: The tourists! And Jesus says, not one stone here will be left on another. And they get nervous and ask him privately: when? What's the sign? And the very first thing out of his mouth — before any of the earthquakes and wars — is: "Watch out that no one deceives you."

Adaeze: Hm. Not "here's the date."

Daniel: Not "here's the date." "Watch out that no one deceives you." And then — "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed."

Adaeze: "Not alarmed." That's — I mean, that's the opposite of how most end-times content online sounds.

Daniel: It's the opposite! And then later in the same chapter, the line every date-setter has to somehow get around: "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."

Adaeze: Not even the Son. That always surprised me.

Daniel: It surprises everybody. Jesus says, I'm not telling you the date — and he says it's not even his to tell. And then — this is the part I love — the very next thing he does is tell stories about servants. A servant whose master is away. And the good servant is the one the master finds — Matthew twenty-four, forty-six — "doing so when he returns." Doing his job.

Adaeze: Not on a hilltop with binoculars.

Daniel: Not on a hilltop with binoculars. And Paul has to deal with this almost immediately. He writes to a church in Thessalonica — this is maybe twenty years after Jesus — and some of them have heard the end is basically here, and they've —

Adaeze: — quit their jobs?

Daniel: Quit their jobs! Or stopped working, anyway. And Paul writes, second Thessalonians: don't become "easily unsettled or alarmed" by some prophecy or letter saying the day of the Lord has already come. And then he says — and I'm paraphrasing only slightly — get back to work. "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat."

Adaeze: That's very practical for an apocalyptic letter.

Daniel: Paul was a tentmaker. He was always practical.

A Long Line of Dates

Adaeze: Can I give you the short history of being wrong?

Daniel: Please. It's your lane.

Adaeze: It's my lane. So — the 1844 people. They were called Millerites, after William Miller, a farmer and Baptist preacher who did very careful math with the book of Daniel. And he wasn't a con man. That's the thing people don't get. Most date-setters genuinely believe it.

Daniel: Mm.

Adaeze: Fast forward. 1988. A former NASA engineer named Edgar Whisenant publishes a little booklet called "88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988." He says it'll happen in September, around Rosh Hashanah. And it sells — some reports say over four million copies.

Daniel: Okay, I have to stop you, because I — I had that booklet.

Adaeze: No.

Daniel: I was seven. My Sunday school teacher — lovely woman, Mrs. Patterson — handed them out. And I remember the night of September twelfth, I'm in bed, and I'm absolutely terrified. Not of the rapture. Of being LEFT. I thought, what if I'm not good enough and my parents go and I'm —

Adaeze: — oh no, you poor kid —

Daniel: — so I put my sneakers on. In bed. Under the covers.

Adaeze: Why the sneakers?

Daniel: I had no idea! I think I figured if I got raptured I should be — you know — ready to run. And in the morning, my dad came in, saw the sneakers, and didn't laugh. He just sat on the bed and said, "Danny, Jesus said nobody knows. Not Mrs. Patterson. Not that booklet. Nobody." And he took my shoes off and we went and had pancakes.

Adaeze: That's a good dad.

Daniel: He was. And then of course, two thousand. Y2K. I'm eighteen, and my uncle Ray fills his entire basement with canned beans. Rice. A generator. Because the computers are going to crash at midnight and civilization ends.

Adaeze: And?

Daniel: And we ate those beans at every family barbecue until about 2004.

Adaeze: Oh, that's perfect.

Daniel: To be fair to Uncle Ray, a lot of programmers worked really hard so that midnight was boring. But — still. The beans.

Adaeze: Okay, and then the one I actually studied up close. Harold Camping. 2011. A Christian radio broadcaster who said the rapture would come on May twenty-first. Billboards all over the country. And some of his followers sold their houses, quit their jobs, gave away their savings.

Daniel: I remember the billboards.

Adaeze: I interviewed a woman for my research, a retired nurse. She'd given away nearly everything. And I talked to her the morning of May twenty-second. And she was very quiet, and then she said — I'll never forget it — "Well. I still have to feed the cat."

Daniel: Oh.

Adaeze: Which is — honestly, it's the most theologically sound thing anybody said that whole year.

Daniel: It's Paul! Get back to work. Feed the cat.

Adaeze: And here's the part I want people to hear. Camping, the next year — he was ninety — wrote a letter. He said, "We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing." And he called his own prediction "sinful." He said God "will end time in his time, not ours."

Daniel: That takes a lot. At ninety.

Adaeze: It does. I'll give him that. Most never say it.

The New Prophets

Daniel: Okay. Now the twist. Tell me about the prophets in hoodies.

Adaeze: The prophets in hoodies. So, May 2023, a short public statement gets signed by hundreds of AI scientists and tech leaders — including some of the people running the biggest AI companies. One sentence. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

Daniel: Extinction. Their word.

Adaeze: Their word. Geoffrey Hinton — he won a Nobel Prize for the work that made modern AI possible — left Google in 2023 partly so he could talk freely about the dangers. And there's a big survey, published in 2024, of almost twenty-eight hundred AI researchers. The typical answer — the median — gave about a five percent chance that advanced AI leads to human extinction or something like it.

Daniel: Five percent. Okay — just — if an airline told me there was a five percent chance my plane goes down —

Adaeze: — you'd stay home.

Daniel: I'd stay home! I'd drive. I'd walk.

Adaeze: And the Doomsday Clock — the one the atomic scientists keep — in January this year they moved it to eighty-five seconds to midnight. Closest it's ever been. And AI was one of the reasons they gave.

Daniel: Hm.

Adaeze: But there's a second camp, and this is where it gets fascinating for someone like me. The optimists. Ray Kurzweil has been predicting for years that around 2045 we hit "the Singularity." Machines become smarter than us, we merge with them, maybe upload our minds, and — essentially — death becomes optional.

Daniel: Wait. Upload your mind and live forever —

Adaeze: — that's heaven.

Daniel: That's heaven!

Adaeze: Science-fiction people have a nickname for it. "The rapture of the nerds." And honestly, once you see it, you can't unsee it. A coming superintelligence that's either going to save us or judge us. A date. True believers. People who say the rest of us just don't see the signs.

Daniel: Okay, that's — that's a little uncanny.

Adaeze: I'll tell you something that happened to me. Last year I was at a conference, and over dinner a young AI researcher — really brilliant, really sweet — told me very calmly that he'd stopped saving for retirement. Because he didn't think there'd be a world to retire in.

Daniel: He sold his house.

Adaeze: In a way. He sold his house. Different billboard, same night of waiting.

Daniel: I want to be careful here, though. Because I don't want to make fun of the AI safety people. Some of these risks are real.

Adaeze: Agreed. And to be fair — plenty of serious AI scientists think the doom talk is overblown. Yann LeCun, one of the founders of the field, has said so loudly for years. The experts genuinely disagree.

Daniel: So even the prophets don't agree on the —

Adaeze: — on the prophecy. They never do. That's — honestly, that's the most consistent finding in my field.

The Image That Speaks

Daniel: Okay. I have to do Revelation thirteen, because if you spend five minutes on Christian social media right now, this is the verse.

Adaeze: The talking image.

Daniel: The talking image. John sees a beast — a power that demands worship — and then a second beast who makes people build an image of the first one. And verse fifteen: "The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak."

Adaeze: And people read that and think —

Daniel: — chatbot.

Adaeze: Chatbot. Can I give you the historian's footnote?

Daniel: That's why you're here.

Adaeze: So, John's first readers lived in Roman Asia — modern Turkey. And the emperor was worshipped there. Statues of the emperor, temples, festivals where you burned incense to him — and if you were a Christian who refused, you could lose your trade, your guild, sometimes your life.

Daniel: Mm.

Adaeze: And — this is the fun part — talking statues were a known trick. There's a Greek writer, Lucian, second century, who describes a religious showman named Alexander who had a snake god — a puppet, basically, with a human-looking head — and he made it "speak" by running a tube through it and having someone talk into the other end.

Daniel: A ventriloquist god.

Adaeze: A ventriloquist god. People paid good money to ask it questions.

Daniel: Okay, that's — wow. So a statue that talks wouldn't have sounded like science fiction to John's readers —

Adaeze: — it would have sounded like Tuesday. Like a temple scam they'd heard about.

Daniel: And six-six-six?

Adaeze: A lot of scholars think it's a name in code. In Hebrew, letters double as numbers. And "Nero Caesar," spelled in Hebrew letters, adds up to six hundred sixty-six. And some ancient copies of Revelation actually say six-sixteen — which is what you get if you spell Nero the Latin way.

Daniel: That's a pretty good clue.

Adaeze: It's a REALLY good clue. Now — I'll give back the ball, because the interpretation is your lane.

Daniel: And I'll be honest about it, because Christians genuinely disagree here. Some read Revelation as mostly about Rome, back then. Some as a map of all church history. Some as mostly still future. And some as a picture of a pattern that repeats in every age. I believe Jesus is really coming back. That part isn't a metaphor. But I think the beast is a pattern. Every empire that demands worship. Rome did it. Every tyrant since has done it.

Adaeze: So could AI be part of the pattern?

Daniel: Could be. I'm not going to say no. If people start bowing to a machine — trusting it like God, letting it tell them what's true and good — that's the pattern. But notice what John's actually worried about. It's not the technology. It's the WORSHIP. Who do you bow to? A statue, an emperor, a stock price, a chatbot — the question's the same.

Adaeze: Hm. Okay. As a historian — I think that's the most defensible reading I've heard from someone in your seat.

Daniel: I'll take it. And the mark of the beast — every generation's had a candidate. Barcodes in the eighties.

Adaeze: Oh, the barcode books! Credit cards. Social Security numbers. Microchips —

Daniel: — vaccines, now AI. If you've been sure about six different marks, maybe — maybe the point was never to guess the technology.

Is the Robot Going to Get Us?

Daniel: Can I tell you what happened at our house last month?

Adaeze: Please.

Daniel: My daughter's four. She's in the back seat, I've got the news on the radio, I'm not paying attention. And it's a segment about AI — someone saying it could end the human race. And from the back seat, this tiny voice says, "Daddy, is the robot going to get us?"

Adaeze: Oh no.

Daniel: And I just — I froze. Because I'm the guy who's supposed to have answers, right? I do a podcast about this. And I pulled over. In a gas station. And I turned around, and I thought about my dad and the sneakers. And I said, "Sweetheart. Nobody knows what's going to happen. Not the man on the radio. Not Daddy. But God knows. And God's not scared. So we don't have to be scared either."

Adaeze: What did she say?

Daniel: She said, "Okay. Can we get a slushie?"

Adaeze: The cat. It's always the cat. Or the slushie.

Daniel: It's always the slushie. Your turn. You study this for a living. Do you ever get scared?

Adaeze: Yes. Can I tell you about my grandmother?

Daniel: Of course.

Adaeze: She lived in eastern Nigeria during the civil war. The late sixties. Biafra. People were starving. Planes overhead. And her church was full of people saying this was it — the end of the —

Daniel: — the end of the world.

Adaeze: The end of the world. And honestly, for millions of people, it was the end of their world.

Daniel: Mm.

Adaeze: And my grandmother, every morning, went out and planted yams.

Daniel: Yams.

Adaeze: Yams. My mother asked her once — years later — "Mama, if you thought the world was ending, why were you planting?" And she said, "Because if the Lord comes, he will find me working. And if he doesn't come, we will need yams."

Daniel: That's Matthew twenty-four forty-six. She preached it with a hoe.

Adaeze: She would have liked that. She didn't trust preachers much. She trusted yams.

Okay, but let's be honest

Adaeze: Okay. Now I get to push. And I'm going to push hard, because you've been very comfortable.

Daniel: I've been waiting for it.

Adaeze: Matthew twenty-four, verse thirty-four. Same chapter you've been quoting. Jesus says, "This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened." Two thousand years ago. So — wasn't Jesus himself the first failed date-setter?

Daniel: Yeah. That's the hard one. And I'm not going to pretend it isn't. C. S. Lewis called it "the most embarrassing verse in the Bible."

Adaeze: Lewis said that?

Daniel: In an essay called "The World's Last Night." He didn't hide from it. Here's how I read it. Remember how the chapter starts? The disciples ask about the TEMPLE. "Not one stone left on another." And about forty years later — within a generation — the Romans burned Jerusalem and tore the temple down. In the year seventy. Stone by stone.

Adaeze: So "all these things" is the —

Daniel: — the temple. I think a lot of it is. And then the same chapter says the day and hour of his return — no one knows, not even the Son. So the chapter has two things in it. A judgment on Jerusalem, within that generation, that came true. And a final return, with no date — on purpose.

Adaeze: That's a real reading. Scholars hold it. I'll grant that. I'm not sure the chapter divides as neatly as you'd like.

Daniel: And I'll grant you that. It's not neat. Lewis's own answer was actually the other verse — that Jesus said he didn't know the day. He thought those two verses belong together. The one who said "this generation" also said "not even the Son knows." I can live inside that. I don't think I get to make it tidy.

Adaeze: Okay. Second push. Isn't "nobody knows, stay calm, plant your yams" a little too comfortable? Because some of these AI risks are real. If believers just shrug and say "God's got it," aren't they going to sleep through something serious?

Daniel: Yes. That would be wrong. And I'll say it plainly — a Christian who says "the world's ending anyway, why bother with AI safety" is being lazy, not faithful. We did a whole episode on this — Episode 12 — on what we're teaching these machines. Joseph in Egypt saw seven years of famine coming and he built barns. That's in Genesis. Planning for disaster is biblical.

Adaeze: Thank you. Okay, and I'll concede something back.

Daniel: Go.

Adaeze: The doom talk does real harm too. I see it in my students. Young people telling me they won't have kids, won't plan a career, because the world won't last. I've seen the same thing in apocalyptic sects my whole career, and I never expected to see it in a computer science department. Your verse — "see to it that you are not alarmed" — I think a lot of my secular students need that more than they need another survey.

Daniel: Hm.

Adaeze: And one more, to be fair to you. When the secular version of the end goes wrong, there's no one to forgive you for the date. Camping could say "I sinned." What does the AI forecaster say in 2050 if nothing happened? "My model was off"?

Daniel: "Recalibrating."

Adaeze: Recalibrating.

So What Do We Do?

Daniel: Okay, practical. Somebody's listening to this, they're anxious about AI, maybe about the end of the world. What do they do?

Adaeze: Can I start with a correction? Because somebody's going to email us. There's a famous line, "Even if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant my apple tree today." Everyone says Martin Luther said it.

Daniel: I was about to say it!

Adaeze: I know. But there's no record of it until about 1944. Luther almost certainly never said it.

Daniel: Okay. Your grandmother said it, then. With yams.

Adaeze: Better source.

Daniel: Much better. But here's one that IS real. C. S. Lewis again. 1948. Everybody's terrified of the atomic bomb, and he writes this — and I think you could put "AI" in where he says "bomb" and it would still work. He says, if we're all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, "let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs."

Adaeze: Bathing the children.

Daniel: Bathing the children. And it lines up with the Bible exactly. Jeremiah writes a letter to Jewish exiles in Babylon. Their whole world just ended. Jerusalem's gone. And God tells them — Jeremiah twenty-nine — "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters." And seek the peace of the city where you are.

Adaeze: Plant gardens. In Babylon.

Daniel: In Babylon. Not "wait on the hilltop." Plant gardens. Have kids. Seek the good of the city. And Jesus's last word on it, in Luke: when these things begin, "stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." Lift up your heads. Not hide under the —

Adaeze: — under the covers. With your sneakers on.

Daniel: With your sneakers on.

A Listener Asks

Daniel: We got a message I want to read, because it's — it's very real. A listener writes: "My husband says Jesus is coming back soon, probably in our lifetime, and that AI proves it. He wants to stop saving for our kids' college. Is he right?"

Adaeze: Oh, I've seen this marriage. Many times.

Daniel: Okay. To our listener — first, your husband loves Jesus and wants to be ready, and that's good. Tell him that. But no. Keep saving. Paul told the Thessalonians to keep working. Jesus said the faithful servant is the one found doing his job. Proverbs says a good person leaves an inheritance to their children's children. That's grandkids. The Bible assumes you'll plan for grandchildren.

Adaeze: And from the history side — I've never once met a family that regretted saving for college because the rapture came. I've met plenty who regretted not saving because it didn't.

Daniel: That's going on a mug.

Adaeze: You say that every week, don't you?

Daniel: I really do. And one more thing for him. If Jesus comes back tomorrow and finds you with a college fund for your kids — he's not going to be disappointed in you. That's a faithful servant. That's a yam field.

What Do We Do with a Story Like This

Daniel: Let me try pulling it together. Tell me where I'm overreaching.

Adaeze: You know I will.

Daniel: Jesus told his followers not to be alarmed, not to be deceived, and that no one knows the day — not even him. Every generation since has had someone sure it was theirs: 1844, 1988, 2000, 2011. Now the newest prophets are scientists and engineers, with extinction odds on one side and a digital heaven on the other. Revelation's talking image is real Scripture, but its first readers would have thought of emperor statues and temple tricks, and its point is worship — who you bow to — not which gadget. Some AI risks are real and worth working on. And the Bible's answer to "when" is the same every time: be found faithful. Feed the cat. Plant yams. Save for college.

Adaeze: My refinements. One — Matthew twenty-four thirty-four is still hard. Your reading is serious, but it's not the only one, and skeptics aren't crazy to raise it. Two — the AI risk isn't a prophecy, it's a forecast, and forecasts can be worked on. That's different from a date-setter. Some of these people are trying to prevent the thing they fear. I respect that. And three...

Daniel: Three?

Adaeze: Three is that I've spent twenty years studying people waiting for the end. And the ones who came through it whole — the ones who didn't break — weren't the ones with the best timeline. They were the ones who kept loving the people in front of them. My grandmother. Your dad with the pancakes. I don't know what that proves. But I've noticed it.

Daniel: I think it proves he was right about the servant.

Adaeze: Thank you for having me, Daniel.

Daniel: Dr. Adaeze Nwosu, thank you. To everyone listening with one eye on the headlines: nobody knows the hour. Not the man on the radio, not the forecaster, not me. So take your sneakers off. Go plant something. And if the end comes, let it find you making pancakes for somebody you love. This has been Dust & Starlight.