"Pretty sure" there was some guy who could actually
see the future? I'm gonna need to see a little evidence before I'll swallow that one. If he clearly predicted the events of 9/11, how come nobody used his writings to warn us about it? Fitting historical events into vaguely worded earlier predictions is not very hard if you use a little imagination. Predictions should be able to predict things before they happen, not after. I highly doubt a prediction was made, for example, that specified a group of Muslim hijackers would destroy two towers in New York City and one government office in Washington on the 11th of September, 2001. Supposed psychics never get things that accurate. It's always so vaguely worded that eventually some event will happen that could be fit into the prediction, or else the prediction is just ignored and never brought up again.
The world is most likely not going to end in 2012. This meme comes from the myth that the ancient Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012, which it does not. (see
Mesoamerican Long Count calendar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) And then it was further spread through the mystical rantings of Timothy Leary and other New-Agey types.
Robot takeover doesn't seem too likely to me. We're not going to build superintelligent robots overnight. It's going to take a long time, and I'm sure we humans can find out ways to program them to not harm humans or to destroy themselves if they start to think about harming humans. Even if some crazy psychopath programs some robots that do decide to harm people, the rest of us can program even more robots to take out their robots. The smartest of our current robots, as Michio Kaku explains, have the intelligence of a retarded cockroach, and those robots are not going to do any harm to us considering they're currently exploring the surface of Mars. We have a lot of time to figure these programming issues out as we gradually make more and more complex robots.
Morality is pretty deeply programmed into our own brains, and when somebody's brain starts making immoral decisions, the rest of us can use our morality to enact justice. I don't think computer programmers working on AI will leave morality out of the picture once these things start to gain the power to potentially do harm. Morality seems to be essential for a successful robot design that won't be destroyed by humans or other robots, just like morality was essential for a successful human brain design in the gene pool.