We are living in times that have been called a profitable apocalypse (Anon 2023). A mundane, comforting sense of the future that has always been here before has suddenly disappeared. Life feels like a protracted now accompanied with a sense of an ending.

Growing up in Athens, Greece I remember vividly the fascination my high school classmates and I shared about “the Bermuda Triangle.” In hushed tones we spoke about this mysterious remote region where ships and airplanes—if they made the grave error of wandering into or over it—would disappear.

With no public debate and scant publicity, deep-sea mining has gotten quietly underway in recent years. Exploratory mining contracts have been granted for over 1 million square kilometers of seabed in international waters, while the International Seabed Authority—the official UN body regulating ocean “resources”—deliberates how to cloak the enterprise in sustainababble attire.

In the words of Bartleby, The Scrivener, written by Herman Melville with neither computer nor AI, I would prefer not to.     I don’t have an opinion about AI, especially an opinion about whether AI forecasts the end of the world literally or the end of the world as we know it.