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Comment by orbifold | Hacker News Reader

All this AI doomerism is hiding the obvious and immediate harm that will cause a mass extinction event. Funnily enough people at Anthropic are predicting the end of the Anthropocene, completely absolving themselves from any responsibility for the actual reality that the Anthropocene is defined by human made geologically noticeable changes. Like causing a global climate catastrophe.

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It's possible to have more than one existential risk at a time. We even have a third, since nuclear war doesn't seem completely impossible these days. We probably shouldn't ignore any of them.

Nuclear war is hardly an existential risk.

An all-out global nuclear war (all nuclear nations landing 10% of their warheads in populated areas) would be a disruption comparable to COVID at best.

Can you elaborate on this? I’m not an expert at all but this seems so far from true I’m struggling to understand if you’re serious.

Wouldn’t we expect tens of millions of casualties, nuclear fallout rendering large swathes of countries uninhabitable, and ensuing total societal collapse once the globalized western world is separated from their foreign means of production?

Of course you're correct. Here's a 2019 simulation of escalating full-scale war between the US and Russia, done at Princeton based on what's publicly known about actual force postures. Immediate effects would be 34 million dead, 91 million total casualties, and 30 major economic centers destroyed on each side.

https://www.icanw.org/new_study_on_us_russia_nuclear_war

Fallout would cause significantly more casualties. Then there are the environmental effects. Science on that has evolved over the past few decades, so wikipedia is a good starting point for an overview.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

Since none of this is certain and we're talking about risks, considering the worst cases seems appropriate, and those involve agricultural collapse, several billion dead, mass extinction, and an ozone hole covering most of the planet. It might not kill off the human species, but modern civilization would struggle to recover.

Mass extinction event already happened though. Most known species became extinct because of humans.

It is the paperclip AI scenario: The AI is cheating humans to produce only one thing - but in reality today, its not paperclibs, but datacenters as "the most important product": So the scenario still holds :-D

The existential risk people are worried about a much shorter timeline - like the next 5-10 years. Climate change is serious but very unlikely to lead to anything like ending the Anthropocene in the next 5 years.

400,000 people in Europe are displaced. Pretending that this is a future issue is tremendously disingenuous. Things don't need to be civilisation-ending to cause a degree of harm that is worth focusing on.

The OP is literally talking about “mass extinction”, it’s not a real concern that climate change will cause mass extinction in the next 5 years.

It should absolutely be focused on anyway. I don’t know how you got the other impression. The US gov paying to stop windmills and solar is insane.

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