"I mean, sometimes you get these like, late civilization vibes,” said Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive officer, at a recent event for the Cybertruck, his piece of absurdist automotive art. "The apocalypse could come along at any moment. And here at Tesla, we have the finest in apocalypse technology.”

There’s a lot of this end-of-days talk around right now. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were stories about Silicon Valley billionaires prepping for Armageddon by purchasing bunkers in New Zealand. But recently, I’ve been hearing and reading more and more of it, especially linked to artificial intelligence.

I find it more fascinating than troubling, because I see eschatological obsessions as social phenomena not rational analyses of where we’re headed. Still, such thinking can be dangerous when exploited by political opportunists. At the very least, it’s a wasteful distraction from addressable problems right in front of us. The real question we should be concerned with is why cataclysmic prophets sometimes attract big followings. Understanding this can help us avoid the paths they may lead us down.