The sounds got here out of my mouth with an surprising urgency. The cadence was deliberate—extra befitting of an incantation than an order: one massive strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade. The phrases hung within the air for a second, giving approach to a stillness punctuated solely by the delicate whir of distant fluorescent lights and the light hum of a Muzak cowl of Bruce Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain.”
The time was 9:03 a.m.; the solar had been up for just one hour. I watched the sort lady behind the counter stifle a watch roll, a small mercy for which I will likely be eternally grateful. Her look indicated that she’d been by this earlier than, sufficient instances to see by my bravado. I used to be simply one other man standing in entrance of a Panera Bread worker, asking her at hand me 30 fluid ounces of allegedly lethal lemonade. (I’d have procured it myself, however it was stored behind the counter, like a managed substance.)
I got here to Panera to the touch the face of God or, on the very least, expertise the low-grade anxiousness and physique sweats one can anticipate from consuming 237 milligrams of caffeine in quarter-hour. Actually, the web despatched me. Since its launch final yr, Panera’s extremely caffeinated Charged Lemonade has turn into a well-liked meme—most notably on TikTok, the place individuals vlog from the entrance seat of their automotive about how hopped up they’re after chugging the neon beverage. Final December, a tongue-in-cheek Slate headline requested, “Is Panera Bread Attempting to Kill Us?”
Within the following months, two wrongful-death lawsuits have been certainly filed towards the restaurant chain, arguing that Panera was accountable for not adequately promoting the caffeine content material of the drink. The fits allege that Charged Lemonade contributed to the deadly cardiac arrests of a 21-year-old school scholar and a 46-year-old man. Panera didn’t reply to my request for remark however has argued that each lawsuits are with out benefit and that it “stands firmly by the security of our merchandise.” In October, Panera modified the labeling of its Charged Lemonade to warn individuals who could also be “delicate to caffeine.”
The allegations appear to have achieved the unimaginable: They’ve made a suburban chain finest identified for its bread bowls really feel thrilling, even harmful. The memes have escalated. Search dying lemonade on any platform, and also you’ll see a cascade of grimly ironic posts about the whole lot from lemonade-assisted suicide to with the ability to peer into alternate dimensions after sipping the juice. Very like its late-aughts boozy predecessor 4 Loko, Charged Lemonade is driving a wave of recognition due to the implication that consuming it’s presumably unsafe. One viral submit from October put it finest: “Panera has apparently found the fifth loko.”
Like many internet-poisoned women and men earlier than me, I possess each a traditional Freudian dying drive and an embarrassing want to expertise memes within the bodily world—an effort, maybe, to situate my human type among the many algorithms and timelines that dominate my life. However there may be another excuse I used to be in a strip mall on the shortest day of the yr, permitting the really useful day by day allowance of caffeine to Evil Knievel its manner throughout my blood-brain barrier. I got here to make sense of a yr that was outlined by existential threats—and by an odd, pervasive celebration of them.
In 2023, I spent quite a lot of time listening to good individuals speak concerning the finish of the world. This was the yr that AI supposedly “ate the web”: The arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022 shifted one thing within the public consciousness. After many years of promise, the contours of an AI-powered world felt to some as in the event that they have been taking form. Will these instruments come for our jobs, our tradition, even our humanity? Are they really revolutionary or simply showy—like spicier variations of autocorrect?
A number of the largest gamers in tech—together with a flood of start-ups—are racing to develop their very own generative-AI merchandise. The expertise has developed swiftly, lending a frenzied, disorienting feeling to the previous a number of months. “I don’t suppose we’re prepared for what we’re creating,” one AI entrepreneur informed me ominously and unbidden once we spoke earlier this yr. Civilizational extinction has moved from pure science fiction to fast concern. Geoffrey Hinton, a well known AI researcher who give up Google this yr to warn towards the risks of the expertise, instructed that there was as excessive as a ten % probability of extinction within the subsequent 30 years. “I believe that whether or not the possibility of existential calamity is 0.5 % or 50 %, we must always nonetheless take it critically,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, informed my colleague Ross Andersen this previous spring.
In Could, tons of of AI executives, researchers, and tech luminaries together with Invoice Gates signed a one-sentence assertion written by the Middle for AI Security. “Mitigating the chance of extinction from AI needs to be a world precedence alongside different societal-scale dangers comparable to pandemics and nuclear battle,” it learn. Debates as soon as contained to a small subculture of technologists and rationalists on area of interest on-line boards comparable to LessWrong grew to become fodder for the press. Regular individuals making an attempt to maintain up with the information needed to hack by a jungle of recent terminology: x-risk, e/acc, alignment, p(doom). By mid-year, the AI-doomerism dialog was absolutely mainstreamed; existential calamity was within the air (and, we joked, in our fast-casual lemonades).
Then, as if by cosmic coincidence, this pressure of apocalyptic thought fused completely with popular culture in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Because the atomic-bomb creator’s biopic took over the field workplace, AI researchers toted across the Pulitzer Prize–profitable ebook The Making of the Atomic Bomb, suggesting that they too have been pushing humanity into an unsure, presumably apocalyptic future. The parallels between Los Alamos and Silicon Valley, nonetheless facile, needled at a query that had been bothering me all yr: What would compel an individual to construct one thing if they’d any cheap perception that it’d finish life on Earth?
Richard Rhodes, the creator of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, provided me one clarification, utilizing an idea from the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. On the core of quantum physics is the concept of complementarity, which describes how objects have conflicting properties that can’t be noticed on the identical time. Complementarity, he argued, was additionally the identical precept that ruled innovation: A weapon of mass destruction may be a instrument to avert battle.
Rhodes, an 86-year-old who’s spent most of his grownup life occupied with our most harmful improvements and talking with the boys who constructed the bomb, informed me that he believes this duality to be on the core of human progress. Pursuing our best ambitions could give approach to an unthinkable nightmare, or it might enable our desires to come back true. The reply to my query, he provided, was someplace on that skinny line between the thrill and terror of true discovery.
Roughly 10 minutes and 15 ounces into my strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade, I felt a delicate twinge of euphoria—a barely perceptible effervescence going down at a mobile degree. I used to be alone within the restaurant, ensconced in a sales space and checking my Instagram messages. I’d shared an image of the large cup sweating modestly on my desk, an affordable bid for some on-line engagement that had paid off. “I hope you reside,” one pal had written in response. I glanced down at my smartwatch, the place my coronary heart fee measured a nice 20 beats per minute larger than normal. The within of my mouth felt improper. I ran my tongue over my tooth, noticing a tremendous dusting of sugar blanketing the enamel.
I didn’t really feel the nice and cozy creep of dying’s candy embrace, solely a sensation that the lights have been very vivid. This was accompanied by an edgy feeling that I’d characterize because the antithesis of focus. I stood as much as ask a Panera worker in the event that they’d been getting quite a lot of Charged Lemonade tourism round these components. “I believe there’s been loads, however truthfully most of them order it by the drive-through or on-line order,” they stated. “Not many come up right here such as you did.” I retreated to my sales space to let my mind vibrate in my cranium.
It’s absurd to think about that lemonade may kill you—no much less lemonade from a soda fountain inside steps of a Jo-Ann Materials retailer. That absurdity is a big a part of what makes Panera lemonade meme. However there’s one thing deeper too, a fact lodged within the banality of a strip-mall drink: Dying is in every single place. Right now, you may fear about getting shot in school or in a movie show, or killed by police at a site visitors cease; you additionally perceive that you could possibly contract a lethal virus on the grocery retailer or within the workplace. In the meantime, most everybody carries on like the whole lot’s tremendous. We tolerate what feels prefer it needs to be insupportable. That is the temper baked into the meme: Dying by lemonade is ridiculous, however in 2023, it doesn’t appear so far-fetched, both.
The identical goes for computer systems and huge language fashions. Our lives already really feel influenced past our management by the computations of algorithms we don’t perceive and can’t see. Possibly it’s ludicrous to think about a chatbot because the seed of a sentient intelligence that eradicates human life. Then once more, it might have been exhausting in 2006 to think about Fb enjoying a job within the Rohingya genocide, in Myanmar.
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat for the following hour subsequent to my now-empty vessel, anticipating some sort of facet impact just like the recipient of a novel vaccination. Across the time I may sense myself peaking, I grew fairly chilly. However that was it. No interdimensional imaginative and prescient, no coronary heart palpitations. The room by no means melted right into a Dalí portray. From behind my laptop computer, I watched a bunch of three youngsters, all dressed precisely like Kurt Cobain, seize their neon caffeine receptacles from the online-pickup stand and stroll away. Every wore an indelible look of boredom incompatible with the respect one should have for dying lemonade. I started to really feel sheepish about my juice expedition and packed up my belongings.
I’d be mendacity if I informed you I didn’t really feel barely ripped off; it’s an odd sensation, wanting a glass of lemonade to stroll you proper as much as the sting of oblivion. However a touch of impending hazard has all the time been a wonderful advertising instrument—one that may obscure actuality. A fast look on the Starbucks web site revealed that my go-to order—a barely defensible Venti Pike Place roast with an added espresso shot—incorporates roughly 560 milligrams of caffeine, which is greater than double that of a big Charged Lemonade. However I wished to imagine that the meals engineers at Panera had pushed the bounds of the potential.
A few of us are drawn to (allegedly) killer lemonade for a similar motive others fixate on potential Skynet situations. The world seems like it’s changing into extra chaotic and unknowable, hostile and thrilling. AI and a ridiculous fast-casual dying beverage might not be the identical factor, however they each faucet into this power. We’ll all the time discover methods to create new, wonderful, terrifying issues—some that will in the end kill us. We could not wish to die, however in 2023, it was exhausting to neglect that we’ll.
