This seems like the standard conventional doom-and-gloom that someone is always selling, because there is a market for it. And sometimes they are even right.

This seems like the standard conventional doom-and-gloom that someone is always selling, because there is a market for it. And sometimes they are even right. If WWIII breaks out, yeah, things will get bad. There was always something in the past that "experts" were warning about. There was the population crisis mass starvation worries in the 70's, nuclear war in the 80's, peak oil was going to disrupt the 90's, Y2K was going to cause a great depression in the 2000's, climate change, etc. At one time, the crisis of the day was that China was going to be overpopulated, but now it is because of underpopulation. If you want a more high-brow tech related "the end is near" scenario, why not be more worried about AI? Just think how most people are at least somewhat immune to the advertisement / mass persuasion techniques of today. But what happens when there is an army of bots with the equivalent of 1/10/100/1000 human minds working to sway each person on an individual level of various political things? Will we have time to muster a suitable defense if the offense comes on rapidly enough?