The psychology driving existential risk narratives resembles Christian apocalyptic patterns—people are attracted not primarily by rational probability calculations but by a desire to grasp something 'total and eschatological' that orients the entire world, much as millennial Christianity and climate risk narratives do.

The history of AI contains overlooked techniques and paradigms from 'paths not taken' (symbolic AI, logic programming, behavioral AI, agent-based systems) that were not fundamentally wrong but came too early or were abandoned due to paradigm shifts; these deserve rescuing for insights they might contribute to current and future AI research.

Logic programming (exemplified by the WARPLAN system in Prolog) was theoretically elegant—the idea was to express all knowledge as logical statements and let automated deduction handle inference; WARPLAN solved complex planning problems in 15 lines of code versus thousands of lines required in imperative languages.

The agent-based paradigm is agnostic between symbolic and connectionist (neural) approaches—agents can be implemented via either explicit rules or learned representations; the paradigm abstracts over the question of whether intelligence comes from modeling the mind or modeling the brain.

The Stoic view of humans as fundamentally rational beings (every action backed by implicit propositions about the good) contrasts sharply with Freud's view of the unconscious as primary and unknowable; the success of neural network black boxes over explicit symbolic systems suggests human intelligence may be more Freudian than Stoic—mostly unknowable to ourselves.