Are We Doomed? Here's How to Think About It (New Yorker)

[Pluvious]

Whew, quite the journey, this article
My head's still spinning (should not have read it all in one go, lol)

Climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear annihilation,
biological warfare—the field of existential risk is a way to reason
through the dizzying, terrifying headlines.

By Rivka Galchen
June 3, 2024

In January, the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton gave a lecture to Are We Doomed?, a course at the University of Chicago. He spoke via Zoom about whether artificial intelligence poses an existential threat. He was cheerful and expansive and apparently certain that everything was going to go terribly wrong, and soon. “I timed my life perfectly,” Hinton, who is seventy-six, told the class. “I was born just after the end of the Second World War. I was a teen-ager before there was AIDS. And now I’m going to die before the end.”

Most of the several dozen students had not been alive for even a day of the twentieth century; they laughed. In advance of Hinton’s talk, they had read about how A.I. could simplify the engineering of synthetic bioweapons and concentrate surveillance power into the hands of the few, and how a rogue A.I. could relentlessly pursue its goals regardless of the intentions of its makers—the whole grim caboodle. Hinton—who was a leader in the development of machine learning and who, since resigning from Google, last year, has become a public authority on A.I. threats—was asked about the efficacy of safeguards on A.I. “My advice is to be seventy-six,” he said. More laughter. A student followed up with a question about what careers he saw being eliminated by A.I. “It’s the first time I’ve seen anything that makes it good to be old,” he replied. He recommended becoming a plumber. “We all think what’s special about us is our intelligence, but it might be the sort of physiology of our bodies . . . is what’s, in the end, the last thing that’s better,” he said.

...

Brown, eighty-six years old, spoke with the energy of someone sixty years his junior who has somehow had conversations with Xi Jinping and is deeply knowledgeable about the trillions of dollars spent on military weapons globally. “We’re in a real pickle,” he said. He brought up Ellsberg, a longtime advocate of nuclear disarmament. Ellsberg, who died last June, thought that the most likely scenario leading to nuclear war was a launch happening by mistake, Brown said. There are numerous examples of close calls. In June, 1980, the NORAD missile-warning displays showed twenty-two hundred Soviet nuclear missiles en route to the United States. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, was alerted by a late-night phone call. Fighter planes had been sent out to search the skies, and launch keys for the U.S.’s ballistic missiles were removed from their safes. Brzezinski had only minutes to decide whether to advise a retaliatory strike. Then he received another phone call: it was a false alarm, a computer glitch—there were no incoming missiles. In 1983, a Soviet early-warning satellite system reported five incoming American missiles. Stanislav Petrov, who was on duty at the command center, convinced his superiors that it was most likely an error; if the Americans were attacking, they wouldn’t have launched so few missiles. In both instances, only a handful of people stood between nuclear holocaust and the status quo.

...

Nuclear destruction had also been the topic of the first class of the term, when Rachel Bronson, the C.E.O. and president of the Bulletin, was the guest lecturer. In that first class, more than half the students had listed climate change as their foremost concern. By the end of the course, nuclear threats had become more of a concern, and students were speaking about climate change as “a multiplier”—by increasing migration, inequality, and conflict, it could increase the risk of nuclear war.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/10/are-we-doomed-heres-how-to-think-about-it

[walkingman]

1. Good article...we are all doomed. We know this from the day we are born.

It could be disease, accident, aging, nuclear war, climate change, jesus, endless possibilities.

Get over it and enjoy life every single day. ☮

[Kaleva]

10. I agree.

[ThoughtCriminal]

2. Cuban Missile Crisis

I was too young to remember the event. We did not have a bomb shelter, but I remember a picnic basket full of supplies in case we had to "Head for the hills". When I think about our uncertain future, I think back to a time when the prospects for any future seemed very bleak.

If had a glimpse of life in 2024 back in the 60's,70s, or 80's, I would say: "I'll take that future".

[Metaphorical]

3. What's a few doomsday between friends?

I was actually heartened recently when an Iranian missile hit an unoccupied area in Israel, and a couple of days later, a return missile hit an unoccupied area in Iran. This is the equivalent of pulling out a sword, then a few moments later pulling out a whetting stone, all in the presence of an enemy who also has a sword and a whetting stone. I think Netanyahu is an ass, but he's an ass of a country that is well within range of multiple enemies, some of them armed with nuclear weapons.

I fully expect a limited nuclear war within my life time -- I'm 60, so that means within the next ten to twenty years. Indeed, it can be argued that we (the US) has already deployed nuclear weapons. There are thermobaric bombs that are nearly as destructive but with less fallout that the Russians deployed early on against the Ukranians.

Climate change is an accelerator, but I suspect that it may also be a self-correcting one - once AMOC (the Atlantic Meridineal Oceaning Current, which includes the Gulf Stream) completely stalls within the next couple of decades, we'll have reached the superstorm stage that has been presaged recently - hurricanes stall and build in the Atlantic and the Gulf, heat domes in the US cover much of the continental US for weeks on end, a new climate paradigm that I think will ultimately usher in an ice age within a few hundred years, if previous climate records are any indication.

Climate change by itself will not end civilization in the next two decades, but It will make adapting more and more challenging. Similarly, a limited nuclear war will likely not render an area permanently unliveable, but it will have an impact on life span and birth rate in the affected areas, and will of course have a very disruptive effect on human social structures.

Humans are hardy and adaptable. The world will not end in a flash of light, but civilization will likely be disrupted irreparably by all of these factors. Those places that have the resources and infrastructure to rebuild will do so. It's instructive to remember that the Roman empire collapsed in the 5th century AD, but that was partially because most of the Roman civic instructure moved to Constantinople in the East and Aragon (Spain) in the West. By the 8th century, the city of Rome was a village of maybe 10,000 people. However, when the Moors (the descendants of the Carthaginians, themselves descendants of Phoenicians) invaded in the 8th to 10th century, the Spanish/Aragon Papacy (the remnants of the Roman ruling class) retreated back to Rome and rebuilt. The Medicis came into power primarily because they were effectively pioneers.

This impromptu history lesson is given just to show that human civilization will survive, but the places and positions of power will continue to shift over time. The United States is destined to fall apart, I'm absolutely certain of that, but Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, etc., will survive. Humans seek narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends, but this simply a pattern that we impose on a complex, chaotic world to make sense of it.

[former9thward]

4. When was the Iranian missile attack that just went into an unoccupied area?

[Metaphorical]

5. Early May, if I remember correctly

nt

[former9thward]

6. I only ask because Iran launched a massive attack against Israel in April.

The only reason they did not kill massive amounts of people is because of Israel's Iron Dome defense.

[harumph]

7. The US is destined to fall apart because it's original federalism was never amended

with a better model. The states have always had too much autonomy in policing, taxing and laws.
50 fiefdoms in waiting. I guess it makes for profitable arbitraging - but not a unified country. France for example
abandoned their electoral college system in 1962 to allow the popular vote to decide the presidency.
Apparently, they seem capable of convicting former leaders of corruption as well. France derives 70% of its
electricity from nuclear and they have a better safety record than we do at our measly (20%).
Repubs traditionally live to point to the French as being stupid or effeminate. That should tell you something
right there. Obviously the French have their problems...but secularism and energy policy aren't among them.

[Metaphorical]

8. Yup

The Federalist coalition (ironically) evolved into the Southern Secessionist movement prior to the Civil War. The Strict Constitutionalists that now sit on the SCOTUS are Federalists - they do not believe that the Bill of Rights should exist, which was the primary concession that the Federalists made to the Anti-Federalist northern states (with the 2nd Amendment being the poison pill that the Federalists added after the agreement).

I still think we're likely to see the US split into at least three separate countries before the end of the century, and quite possibly as many as six. Too many corporate interests driving significant chunks of the country towards neo-feudal oligarchies, too many billionaires with essentially unchecked power.

[BoRaGard]

9. .