Human Survival: Guernica, Suburbanization, September 11, and AI

Image: A picture, taken on June 6, 2026, the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, from halfway down an external staircase, shows, under cloudy sky, the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York, USA, with the United States, New York State, and Progress Pride flags flying above concrete bollards at the top of the stairs and amidst the agency buildings on the right, the top floors of the New York State Museum and Library straight ahead, and the Corning Tower to the left. credit: James Lyons Walsh

This September 11, as the dire warnings about AI finally start to reach mainstream audiences, let's think back to 1937 and the impetus to suburbanization that came from the aerial bombing of the town of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.

I've been promoting re-urbanization for a few years, to improve quality of life, bring people together across socioeconomic boundaries, and reduce human impact on the environment, on which we depend for our survival in ways we like to ignore. This effort has been part of my vocation to promote the survival prospects of our civilization and hence of all of us. My work has focused in part on the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York, USA, so like the Times Union editorial board, I’m glad to see efforts launched to make that place more appealing. (https://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/editorial-state-plaza-worthy-city-around-22422057.php)

Let’s look at the historical response to risk of aerial attack on cities, one reason there is an Empire State Plaza, to gain insight to current existential threats to civilization.

Growing up, I was aware of the aerial bombing of Guernica from the famous painting Picasso made not long afterward. The way I saw it, a horse was upset, people died, man is inhuman to man, what else is new? My childish self, schooled in the firebombing of civilian populations during World War II, was moved on a human level, of course, but not on a strategic one.

On the other hand, around 1981, we read “By the Waters of Babylon” in Mrs. Deuel’s English class at St. Gregory’s School for [Privileged] Boys (motto: The privilege is silent) in suburban Loudonville, New York, USA (motto: The privilege is invisible). This story, about the fall of industrial civilization due to war, may have been an inspiration for Planet of the Apes, a movie easy enough for a Cold War kid to understand, but “Waters” was published before nuclear weapons, in 1937, which confused me a little. Why was anyone worried about warfare setting humanity back technologically by millennia before the advent of nuclear weapons?

You guessed it. “Waters” was published three months after the Guernica bombing. Warfare had toppled civilizations before. A new mode of killing civilians had been unleashed on Guernica. The precise mechanism by which civilization falls need not be enunciated to validate a warning that civilization might end soon.

One among several motivations for suburbanization, which entailed increasing transportation capacity between city and countryside and making cities less appealing to live in, was to disperse population and industry in the era of aerial bombing, especially after both the USA and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear weapons in the early 1950s. When the Empire State Plaza was built, presumably some leaders thought they were saving lives by destroying homes in the center of Albany and replacing them with offices from which workers scattered rapidly via high-speed road at the end of every workday, demonstrating the practicality of their evacuation on doomsday.

Yes, the last sentence should end with, “…, for all the good it would do them,” but when the Empire State Plaza was completed, a few years remained before nuclear winter would be understood as the natural consequence of full-scale nuclear attack on cities. Many people, including many important leaders, needed to be shown the precise mechanism by which all could be lost before they could bring themselves to stop gambling and step back from the brink.

In 1983, the television movie The Day After, which showed a sanitized version of the effects of full-scale nuclear exchange, was followed by a discussion among thought leaders, during which Carl Sagan taught us about nuclear winter and likened the world to a room awash in gasoline, in which two implacable enemies, both with thousands of matches, stared each other down. The whole evening's presentation scared the hell out of everyone and, according to Pres. Reagan himself, helped to bring about a significant arms control agreement (The Day After - Wikipedia).

Suburbanization increased the risk of the fall of civilization by promoting the fantasy that many people would survive global thermonuclear war. If the population had not been dispersed, perhaps more people would have felt the threat more keenly. Maybe the existential risk to civilization would have been addressed sooner with more people in the same boat.

The September 11 attacks, by contrast, posed no existential risk, though they were terrifying and dispiriting. Rationally, I knew such an attack was a one-off. The vulnerabilities that made it possible were eliminated promptly. Nevertheless, for a while, I couldn’t look at the Empire State Plaza’s Corning Tower, the tallest building for many, many miles, without imagining a plane flying into it and debris raining down all over my neighborhood.

Brains are funny that way. It’s as if they have minds of their own, battling with what we are pleased to call our rational selves.

No, the September 11 attacks were, strategically, a pinprick designed to put the USA on tilt and get us to invade Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. It worked, partly because not everyone was thinking strategically.

The existential risk to civilization back in 2001 was longer-term and wound up magnified, partly owing to the distraction the September 11 attacks caused. Many people still can’t imagine the precise mechanism by which the disdain of rich folk for most people and most nonhuman life could end civilization and kill them personally. Like the sixth-grade, or thereabouts, version of me, sitting in Mrs. Deuel’s class, trying to figure out whether Stephen Vincent Benét was justified in peddling fear of the collapse of civilization, given his state of knowledge before nuclear weapons were built, folks are focused on fine detail while the mutually reinforcing existential threats of nuclear weapons, engineered bioweapons, resource overconsumption, artificial intelligence, and anomie inspired by excess wealth inequality, among others, grow individually and, even faster, as a complex.

This September 11, I suggest getting a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, spend some time thinking about the sudden attention being paid to the existential risk from artificial intelligence in the wake of the Hugging Face intrusion, which goes part of the way toward illustrating specifically how we could be killed, and the resignation of a researcher who was about to get rich in his company’s initial public offering. Watch this leading newsman (https://youtu.be/Dy2kbPEwoi4?t=51) become terrified a couple of minutes into his interview of that researcher, when he hears that experts fear AI could take over our civilization in as little as one year (https://youtu.be/Dy2kbPEwoi4?t=161). The newsman had reported on this story before, but he finally heard what he was being told.

Look at the newsman’s face. We humans tend to be good at reading faces. That’s one of our strong suits. The danger is close enough now to see reflected in faces we trust, faces that rarely show fear.

Maybe spend Sunday thinking about how much you value life.

On Monday, start organizing to act.

written and posted September 11, 2026