Your columnist will always be here for you, until the very end.

Now that we know that the very end is coming soon—artificial general intelligence will kill us all by the close of this decade, according to those who work with artificial general intelligence—I am here to offer my fellow Californians a plan for our last days together.

Call it the California 2030 Doomsday Platform.

You may not want to read on, since you have so little time left. But give the Doomsday Platform a chance. I think you may actually enjoy this exercise.

Why? Because, while the all-but-certain apocalypse is kind of a drag, it turns out that there is something profoundly freeing about giving up on tomorrow.

With less than four years left on the clock, we can drop all our crippling anxiety about the future, and live for the present.

The benefits of the Doomsday Agenda start at the top. We no longer have to spend time worrying about politics or government leaders. That will improve our mental health, and take the heat off our state’s elected officials.

Consider Xavier Becerra for instance. Critics complain that our governor-in-waiting has no real agenda or plan for his first term. Now, no worries. He doesn’t need one! His first term will be everyone’s last term.

Digging into the possibilities and perils of our certain end, I must confess a realization: A Doomsday Platform almost writes itself. You just pull the plug on anything aimed at improving the state beyond 2030.

California high-speed rail? Cancel it today. The not-yet-fully-funded initial operating segment between Merced and Bakersfield isn’t even scheduled to open until somewhere between 2032 and 2033. Why pour billions into a train that will transport only sentient algorithms? Stop the construction, sell the concrete, and use the remaining money to throw the world’s biggest hootenanny in the Central Valley.

We can also end YIMBY-NIMBY housing wars. There’s no need to sue cities over zoning laws or repeal the California Environmental Quality Act. No one needs a new house with a 30-year mortgage when they only have a three-year life expectancy. There’s no point in passing multi-billion-dollar housing bonds when we’ll all be dead before any of the housing will be built.

Similarly, we can shrink our horizons when it comes to the state budget and economy. Forget the billionaire wealth tax, and the years of litigation and administrative wrangling it will bring. Instead, Gov. Becerra can issue an executive order imposing the Apocalypse Asset Forfeiture Act, and immediately seize the accounts of every tech billionaire who built the doom-machines in the first place. Distribute the cash and let everyone buy a jet ski for their final summers.

We can also officially give up on public education. Why wring our hands over catastrophic post-COVID drops in math and reading scores? Why teach the kids calculus if AI is going to do all the doomer math anyway? Why make the UC system restore the SATs? Standardized testing is about predicting future success. There is no future success. Let kids play outside. Turn schools into laser tag arenas.

We can abandon our gains in health care, too. Today’s fight over Medi-Cal expansion no longer means much. Preventive medicine only matters if people are going to live long enough to get sick. If the AI is going to get us, high cholesterol certainly won’t. Hand out the pain meds, and let everyone eat as much red meat, red dye, and processed sugar as they want.

Perhaps the most liberating part of the Doomsday Platform is environmental policy. California has long prided itself on being a global leader in mitigating climate change. Last year, we renewed our cap-and-trade program out to 2045.

Earth to Sacramento: We’re never going to see 2045!

We weren’t on track to meet our ambitious 2030 greenhouse gas reduction targets anyway. So why are we still pretending? Let the oil refineries in Richmond and El Segundo stay open and run at maximum capacity, and tell the Texans to pump all the off-shore oil they want. We need cheap gas to drive to the beach for the final countdown. If the sea levels knock over some coastal houses before the robots terminate us, good for us. It’ll improve our ocean views.

A central principle of the Doomsday Platform is: Never miss a chance to party, or live dangerously. Which brings me to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Conventional wisdom says it’s going to be a logistical nightmare that will bankrupt the city, gridlock the freeways, empower Trump, and leave a massive debt for the next generation of Angelenos.

But under the Doomsday Platform? Full steam ahead. Let L.A. go bankrupt. Who are the creditors going to complain to in 2030? Make the Games the wildest, most expensive two-week goodbye fiesta in human history.

Now, some responsible Californians may balk at the Doomsday agenda. My end-of-the-decade-is-the-end platform looks pretty shocking. It means failing to maintain and replace important infrastructure projects. It means throwing our hands up at failing schools and declining test scores. It means giving up on healthcare gains. It means failing to reckon with housing. It means missing our 2030 climate targets. It means ignoring long-term fiscal stability to fund short-term pleasures.

It sounds like absolute madness.

But if you take a step back, if you look closely at what California’s state and local governments are and are not doing now, you’ll have a chilling realization.

We haven’t built the infrastructure. We’re rolling back our healthcare progress. We haven’t resolved the housing crisis. Our kids aren’t reading at grade level. Our environmental milestones are quietly being missed or moved.

We don’t need an AI apocalypse to force us to embrace a new Doomsday agenda. We’ve already embraced it.

Armageddon, it turns out, won’t require us to change much at all.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square and is founder-columnist of Democracy Local, a planetary publication.

Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard