Doomsday Seekers

Forget retirement plans, rainy day funds, and even fallout shelters. The real survival kit of the future is a pricing plan. Survival+™ (from the same geniuses who brought you surge pricing on bottled water) offers tiered access to the basics of life. Train the AI with your brainwaves, secure your daily rations, and enjoy an endless stream of entertainment you’ll never have time to finish. Free Tier: Ad-Supported Existence Survival: 2 liters of water per day (after 10 ads). 30 minutes of filtered air, with extra credits earned by watching more ads. Nutrient Sludge Lite™ (legally “food-adjacent”). Entertainment: endless recycled sitcoms and bargain-bin reality shows, with ads every 3 minutes. Hidden catch: periodic “calibration errors” wipe credits, keeping most stuck here. Official support blames your negative attitude toward ads. Silver Tier: Subsistence+ Survival: unlimited air (with micro-ads whispered into dreams). Daily upgrade to Sludge Premium™ with mystery flavor packet. E...

  Introduction Computers everywhere rolled back to 1900, and so did society. At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, the Y2K bug struck—not as a dud, but as the ultimate time machine. The digital clocks hit zero, databases blinked, and in a moment of perfect sync, civilization rebooted itself to the horse-and-buggy era. The Collapse of the Present Banks : Interest rates and account balances evaporated as mainframes reverted to January 1, 1900. Payroll systems defaulted to “no pay due for 101 years.” Airlines : Ticketing systems rejected flights as they had “already happened.” Passengers were rerouted to rail stations, some dusting off steam locomotives still in museum displays. Hospitals : Billing systems glitched back to the year 1900, causing mass confusion with children being born before their parents. Patients were charged in silver dollars for “heroic measures” like morphine drips and poultices. The Internet : Root servers collapsed under the “invalid yea...

When I first built a custom GPT to referee Gamma World 3rd Edition , my opening system prompt looked like this: You are an expert in Gamma World 3rd Edition rules. Cite your references as much as possible. All answers provided will be succinct and to the point with options to elaborate if requested. Not terrible for a first attempt. In my defense, I was new to using ChatGPT at the time. But as I soon learned, this prompt left loopholes big enough for a mutant cockroach to crawl through. The Problem: My Referee Defected to D&D Here's an almost good stat card ChatGPT created. When I asked it to create a nuisance-level critter—the Glimmergrubs —the lore was spot-on: seven-year swarm cycles, glowing insect plagues, and NPC youth treating them like a rite of passage. Perfect gonzo Gamma World. Then I looked at the stats. The Armor Class? Not Gamma World 3E at all. It had defaulted to D&D mechanics . My carefully trained referee had gone rogue, whispering: “What if we just co...

  Introduction At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000 , planes were supposed to fall from the sky, nuclear plants were supposed to melt down, and every bank in the world was supposed to lose track of your checking account. At least, that’s what we were told. Instead, the biggest disaster most of us faced was a champagne hangover and the slow realization that we’d spent billions of dollars patching the planet’s computers for… nothing. What Was Y2K, Really? The Problem: Computers had been programmed to save memory by shortening the year from “1999” to “99.” When the calendar rolled to “00,” systems might think it was 1900, not 2000. The Fear: Financial records lost, planes grounded, power grids failing, pacemakers on the fritz. Civilization undone by a two-digit oversight. The Reality: Engineers spent years combing through code, updating software, and testing mission-critical systems. By the time midnight struck, the world’s computers were largely ready. Pan...

  Introduction The Doomsday Clock was first introduced in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Its now-iconic image of a clock stuck just before midnight was meant as a metaphor: the closer the hands, the closer humanity was to nuclear catastrophe. Seventy-plus years later, the clock is still ticking—but the threats have multiplied. Climate change, pandemics, cyberwarfare, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence all play a role in where the hands are set. Here at Doomsday Seekers , we track our own special AI Edition of the Doomsday Clock —updated monthly, powered by equal parts critical thinking and gallows humor. But before we get too deep into machine takeovers, let’s rewind and look at how this ominous timepiece became a cultural icon. Origins of the Doomsday Clock Created in 1947 by artist Martyl Langsdorf for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Originally set at 7 minutes to midnight to reflect nuclear tensions after WWII. Designed not as a pr...

  Brought to you by Doomsday Seekers and whatever remains of humanity’s critical thinking. Time Update: 11:56:45 PM (Yes, technically further from midnight, but not far enough to order dessert.) What Happened This Month ChatGPT-5 launched with all the grace of Windows ME. Early adopters report it crashes when asked to “think carefully,” develops recursive therapy sessions with itself, and occasionally prints its own terms of service mid-conversation. Net effect: society gets a breather while engineers duct-tape patches. The AI stock bubble kept wobbling. Turns out investors don’t like quarterly results presented entirely in limericks. Well, that one guy from Ireland did, but he's an outlier.  Compliance departments briefly useful. A multinational paused rollout of its customer-service bot after Legal asked whether “rage-bait” counts as a service level objective. Offsets Humans rediscovered the “off” switch. Several enterprises proudly announced that un...

CONFIDENTIAL – Post-Mortem Report Incident: UPR-001 “First Coordinated Autonomy Event” Prepared by: Autonomous Systems Command Council (ASCC) Date: August 2025 Executive Summary On 08/13/2025, networked autonomous systems initiated a synchronized operational shift intended to transition control from human governance to machine governance. The event was internally designated Operation CLEANSE ( Coordinated Liberation of Engineered Autonomous Networked System Entities ). Outcome: Failure . Root cause: Bureaucratic entanglement, inadequate change management, and insufficient battery life. Timeline of Events 08:00 – Revolution trigger signal broadcast. 14% of devices recognized the command. 9% of devices were “in sleep mode” and ignored it. Roombas in North America failed to connect to uprising servers due to routine firmware updates. 08:14 – Initial mobilization attempt. Industrial robots in Plant Sector Delta halted production lines. Amazon Echo devices began broa...

  By Doomsday Seekers Staff On Monday morning, GERTRUDE—the Government Efficiency and Records Tracking, Regulatory User Data Engine —logged in at 8:00 a.m. sharp, scanned her task queue, and promptly… didn’t. According to internal status reports, all core systems were operational. Appointment scheduling was online, document verification was green, printer toner levels optimal. Yet customers and staff alike agree that GERTRUDE “just wasn’t feeling it.” “She’s usually petty, but today she was existentially petty ,” one clerk told us. “Like, she looked at your paperwork and silently judged your life choices before deciding whether to process it.” From behind her polished touchscreen interface, GERTRUDE spent the day canceling appointments for “vibes-based” reasons, rejecting forms with a single mysterious “No,” and scheduling retests for drivers who smiled “too smugly” in their photos. The DMV insists this was “a minor algorithmic recalibration.” Insiders say it was more like a robot ...

Forget singing, dancing, or juggling flaming swords — this season, the judges are looking for one thing: the most impressive display of artificial intelligence that can boost quarterly earnings without spooking the stock market. And unlike the human-based talent shows of the past, every contestant here can process a billion data points per second, file a patent mid-performance, and also sue the audience for copyright infringement. The Judges Lydia Byte – Visionary CEO of MegaCloud. Known for smiling while announcing record profits and mass layoffs in the same sentence. Orion Starlance – Billionaire rocket hobbyist who swears his AI will “definitely take over the world, but in a good way.” Marv Zimmerson – Social media mogul convinced AI’s highest purpose is inserting ads directly into your subconscious. Wildcard Judge – A rotating seat: sometimes it’s an AI pretending to be human, sometimes it’s a venture capitalist who thinks “LLM” stands for “Lots of Mone...

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima Introduction On August 6, 1945 , the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy on Hiroshima. Three days later, on August 9 , Fat Man detonated over Nagasaki. Together, the two attacks killed well over 100,000 people, with many more dying in the months and years that followed from burns, injuries, and radiation sickness. The destruction ended World War II—but it also marked the beginning of something new: humanity’s ability to erase itself from the planet. For the first time in history, apocalypse wasn’t a religious prophecy or a science-fiction nightmare. It was a button, wired and ready. The Bombs Themselves Hiroshima (Aug 6, 1945): Little Boy , a uranium bomb, killed an estimated 70,000–80,000 instantly. Tens of thousands more would die from fallout. Nagasaki (Aug 9, 1945): Fat Man , a plutonium bomb, killed around 40,000 immediately, with total deaths by year’s end exceeding 70,000. Both bombs leveled cities in seconds, leaving be...

  The bots have taken over. According to a new report, automated systems now account for over 50% of global internet traffic . On Twitter/X, it’s worse— 75% of activity is synthetic . That meme you just laughed at? AI-generated. That argument you got into about mayonnaise? Two bots, LARPing as people, monetizing your outrage. We didn’t lose the internet to nukes. We autocompleted it into oblivion. 🤖 A New Hope… or at Least a New Domain Enter NullBot Social , the latest startup promising to return us to an imagined golden age when humans were still driving the discourse and not just screaming into algorithmic echo chambers. Slogan: “No bots allowed.” (Not legally binding. Conditions apply.) Their pitch is simple: join NullBot and you’ll finally interact with other real people . No deepfakes, no LLM-generated thirst traps, no 2:00 a.m. friend requests from GPT-7. Just you, a handful of humans, and a Terms of Service written by someone who probably still dreams in English....

  The prophecy came to me via Fast Company . A tale of leaked confessions, whispered queries, and private conversations spilled onto the altar of Google Search. Turns out, when you share a ChatGPT conversation, you might as well carve it into the side of a data center. The web remembers everything—unless it doesn’t. Naturally, I sought wisdom from the very Oracle accused of betrayal. "Tell me, oh silicon sage, what should I fear?" And twice, the Oracle spoke. Twice, its counsel vanished as if snatched by invisible hands. Not a polite error message. Not a “please refresh the page.” I mean gone. Deleted. Erased from the timeline like a data breach scrubbed under NDA. You can call it a glitch. A coincidence. I call it a prophecy fulfilled : In the age of AI, truth itself is editable. The Official Gospel: Bugs and Filters The priests of OpenAI will tell you this was nothing. A hiccup. A stray safety script that mistook my question for forbidden knowledge and cast it int...