There’s plenty irrational about treating any hypothetical as a planning imperative, because the set of hypotheticals is unbounded. If “prepare before it arrives” is your rule, then you’re committed to preparing for everything: asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, solar flares, engineered pathogens, EMP, rogue AGI, quantum breaks, grid collapse, crop blight—pick your apocalypse. That isn’t prudence; it’s a guarantee of permanent misallocation.
Risk management isn’t “threat exists in principle, therefore spend now.” It’s prioritisation under constraint: probability × impact × time horizon × cost to mitigate × opportunity cost. If you ignore the cost and the trade-offs, you’re not being responsible—you’re just rebranding anxiety as strategy.
And the tech-history analogy is sloppy. People didn’t “prepare for GPS” as a vague future menace; they built systems because there was a defined requirement, measurable benefits, and a pathway to deployment. Conflating “a technology eventually became useful” with “therefore any future risk justifies action now” is a category error. If you can’t specify the threat model, the timeline, the likelihood, and the concrete mitigations with bounded costs, you’re not doing planning—you’re doing theatre.