essay text by DANIEL PINCHBECK Daniel Pinchbeck cofounded the literary magazine Open City, the web magazine Reality Sandwich, and the website evolver.net, and created the Think Tank Center for Planetary Culture. His most recent book is Afterlife: is there consciousness after Death? I have a terrible yet relatively common confession to make: over the last six to eight years, I lost faith in humanity. I gave up. I convinced myself that we were inevitably headed for extinction in the very near future: 50 years, give or take. I felt that nothing mattered; the jig was up. And that was even before AI happened, with its incipient threat to turn all matter in the universe into paperclips, annihilating us accidentally. How did I reach such a somber conclusion? Previously, I had been a visionary optimist with an esoteric bent. I had written a number of books: the first, Breaking Open…