Sometime today - November 13, 2026 - the world will end. Fittingly, our impending apocalypse falls on Friday the 13th. At least, that was the prediction made by University of Illinois physicist Heinz von Foerster in a highly cited Science paper published in 1960. Though talks of supposed doomsday have renewed in recent months thanks to hyperbolic anxieties over runaway, sentient artificial intelligence, von Foerster had a much different calamity in mind.
For more than a century, the prevailing fear, dating back to English economist Thomas Malthus who lived between 1766 to 1834, was of a booming population outrunning its food supply. Famine would ensue. But Von Foerster broke from that view. He assumed (correctly, as it turns out) that human ingenuity would keep the world mostly fed. The problem, he argued, was that the population would keep accelerating, toward “infinity.”
In a now infamous quote, von Foerster predicted, “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death,” von Foerster and his co-authors wrote. “They will be squeezed to death.” Homo sapiens’ last gasping breath, they predicted, would peter out in the fall of 2026. Like, I don't know, maybe tonight - right after Wheel of Fortune...
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