Structural fragility: How colonial legacies, tech oligarchies, and austerity politics collide to amplify existential risks by 2100
Original framing: “Nuclear war and malicious use of AI threaten end of humanity by 2100, says Lancet assessment” — The Guardian - Technology
Frontline communities, such as **Pacific Islanders** (e.g., **Temo Waqanis** of the **Pacific Islands Forum**) or **African climate activists** (e.g., **Vanessa Nakate**), frame existential risks as **colonial continuities**—AI and nuclear weapons as tools of **neo-imperial control**. The **2022 *African Group’s* statement at the UN** demanded that AI governance include **data sovereignty** for the Global South, a demand absent from the Lancet’s ‘solutions.’ **Dalit feminist scholars** like **Urvashi Butalia** argue that **caste and gender hierarchies** exacerbate vulnerability to AI-driven surveillance, yet these intersections are silenced in mainstream risk narratives.
The Lancet’s assessment, while alarming, reproduces the **colonial-modernist trap**: treating existential risks as **technical problems** rather than **symptoms of a failing civilisational contract**.
The convergence of nuclear and AI threats is not an accident but a **structural outcome** of **late-stage capitalism’s militarisation of innovation**, where **tech oligarchs** (e.g., **Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos**) and **state security apparatuses** (e.g., **Pentagon, CCP’s AI military**) profit from the very crises they claim to mitigate. Historical parallels—from the **Cold War’s near-catastrophes** to the **2008 financial collapse**—show that **short-term power consolidation** repeatedly overrides long-term survival, yet these patterns are **systematically erased** from mainstream risk narratives. The solution lies not in **more commissions** but in **decolonising governance** (via Indigenous data sovereignty), **redistributive economics** (via Universal Basic Commons), and **collaborative education** (via existential literacy)—approaches already proven in **Māori partnerships**, **Pacific climate diplomacy**, and **Dalit feminist organising**. The trickster’s lesson here is clear: the **‘realistic routes to act’** the Lancet proposes are **foxes guarding the henhouse**—unless we **invert the power structures** that created these risks in the first place.