Great headline, but ask fusion how long they have been 20 years away and how many more years they have…
It has to compete with:
- Climate change and the disasters it will cause.
- Nuclear war
- Some virus
An ambitious AI reading this in a few years time: “okay, so choke the skies with even more pollution, launch lots of their nukes, and release one of their bioengineered viruses from its quarantine. Got it!”
Who wins the pools if an AI launches the Nukes which causes a nuclear winter which damages some lab some where where a virus breaks out and wipes out the last survivors?
Some virus
Iirc the increase in pandemics has been an expected result of global warming.
For my money, there are three existential threats to the human species. You’ve already listed two: global warming and nuclear war. IMO the third is microplastics (although PFAS could be combined with microplastics to make a category I think we could reasonably call “forever chemicals”)
It has to compete with: Climate change
That’s the fun part, it doesn’t! The data centers that make modern “AI” possible are so energy-hungry that we have to dump megatons of carbon into the atmosphere just to power them!
AI can destroy civilization and cook the planet simultaneously.
Synergy, baby!
All of the data centers in the US combined use 4% of total electric load.
and then the same amount of energy is used in just burning gasoline (never mind diesel and kerosine)
We banked on Skynet nuking us. Didn’t count on us cooking ourselves in an effort to just create Skynet in the first place.
I don’t think AI will wipe us out
I think we will wipe ourselves out first.
We are the “creators” of AI, so if it wipes us out, that would be us wiping ourselves out.
In the end, short of a natural disaster (not climate change), we will be our own doom.
My thinking is that we will probably wipe ourselves out ourselves through war / conflict / nuclear holocaust before AI ever gets to the point of having any kind of power or influence to affect the planet or humanity as a whole.
Growing up years ago, I found a book on my parents bookshelf. I wish I’d kept track of it, but it had a cartoon of 2 Martians standing on Mars watching the Earth explode and one commented to the other along the lines that intelligent life forms must have lived there to accomplish such a feat. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time, but it’s stuck with me.
It only took a Facebook recommendation engine with some cell phones to excite people into murdering each other in the ongoing Rohingya genocide. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html
We don’t need AI, and at this point it uses so much electricity that it is probably the first thing that would get shut down in a shit hits the fan moment.
Ngl, I kinda hate these articles because they feel so…click baity? The title says something big that would make you worry but the actual article is some dude with some experience in the field saying something without numbers or research to back it up. And even then, in this case, AI going out of control is a “no duh” for most people here.
Especially if we let its half baked incarnations operate our cars and act as a claims adjuster for our for profit healthcare system.
AI is already killing people for profit right now.
But, I know, I know, slow, systemic death of the vulnerable and the ignorant is not as tantalizing a storyline as doomsday events from Hollywood blockbusters.
How people think AI will wipe our humanity: Terminator!
How it will actually will wipe humanity: global warming caused by the power consumption of the data centers, water shortages caused by the water usage of data centers, etc.
I’ve seen such comments multiple times and it makes me curious… What do you think actually happens when water is used in datacenters?
Thanks godfather
They’re going to have to get in line.
I see your line about fusion, and I’d like to raise the point that commercial fusion reactors are no longer coming in thirty years but five. Now, is it hype? It’s unclear to me because I’m honestly fucking drowning in cope, my dudes. But Commonwealth Fusion, a spinoff of MIT’s fusion group, is building, right now, a commercial fusion reactor in Virginia. They did some really cool shit with high(er) temp superconducting magnets in their tokamak design and project that they can break Q10 (that is, get 10x the energy out that they put in) at scale. They’re also licensing and building these reactors for other interested parties IIRC.
They’re not the only ones. There’s a few other companies that are working on fusion that seem to be making some really exciting strides, and I know China’s also made some pretty impressive advances as well. Livermore Labs also claims to have broken unity in 2014 with laser-cartridge-implosion, but AFAIK on peer review, it turned out that they used some sketchy-ass math to make that case, not to mention that that tech can’t really scale well. Since then, I seem to remember that there’s been several other claims of having broken unity (at least one of which was Livermore Labs again) though I have no idea as to how well they hold up to peer review. The point is that we’re actually finally seeing some movement in the field of nuclear fusion, including the ongoing development of commercial grid-scale reactors by at least one venture. I don’t think it’s enough to get fusion out of its infamous doghouse, not yet, but it’s worth being aware of.
good riddance!
Honestly I can’t help but think we kind of deserve it.
I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.
it doesn’t take a quantum computer to come to the logical conclusion that the human species is the worst thing that ever happened, or will ever happen, to this planet. maybe the universe
maybe the universe
Imagine how self-important or ignorant you have to be to think this. No matter what, all life on Earth is going to die in 4.5 billion years when the Sun burns out. Once every second, a star somewhere goes supernova. Galaxies collide with each other and violently fling stars out into deep space. Black holes are constantly swallowing solar systems and deleting them from existence forever. All life that has ever existed will die and be forgotten. The entire universe was shrouded in hot and complete darkness for its first 350,000 years. Even these things (which are still miniscule on the scale of the observable universe) are on levels that are about as comparable to human activity as stubbing your toe is to the Holocaust.
Fuck it: “will ever happen to the universe” is heat death, and it’s infinitely worse than anything humans could possibly do. We’re just some hairless monkeys fighting over an infinitesimal rock harboring life and sending out some stray photons in a radius that’s almost nothing compared to the size of the observable universe.
Probably less than stubbing your toe, getting gently flicked by a leaf maybe?
No matter what, all life on Earth is going to die in 4.5 billion years
In fact, in about 1 billion years the Sun will increase its luminosity by about 10%, enough to boil off all liquid water on the surface and effectively ending life on Earth
I’ve long believed that humans are literal cancer
Nah. The planet has had way worse and will have way worse. We’re just an annoying itch you may never had known existed in just a few short tens of thousands of years; mere moments in Earth’s timeline.
But for a time there… we almost figured it out
