AI is an existential threat, full stop. It can also help us solve many of our greatest problems. Let's not let it solve those problems by removing us as the quickest shortcut.
(obviously "we" won't be around or whatever, but the point remains: yes, you should solve as many existential threats as you can before they're realized)
A lot of things could be an existential threat, nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, climate change, the end of the Flynn effect, cratering birth rates, whatever.
You can always pick out a particularly dystopian vision of the future if you're so inclined. The doom narrative is sells ad revenue, so it's a huge amount of what we all consume online, but it's not really that mapped out to reality...
Somethings get worse, some things get better, in general, the average QoL for the average human is getting better. If we decide not to go to global thermonuclear war, or we decide to unplug any killer AIs that we invent, we'll probably be ok. If we can reduce the population to 3,000-ish humans after the Toba eruption, we can probably survive whatever self-imposed calamities we can create.
I think there's something particularly noxious about the present nihilism trend I see in a lot of this doom themed content. People should go outside and touch grass.
One person saying “this might be catastrophic” and then another saying “ahem, nay sir. It is only likely to be 99.99999% of a catastrophe.”
Edit to add:
Everyone is pulling these random P(doom) numbers out of their asses. This is likely going to be amazing for everyone, we'll cure basically every disease, fix the environment, and go travel to space if we can get out of our own way enough to do it. I cannot believe the consistent negativity I see about this.
I'm sorry, but this is living rent free in my head now: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/08/does-vitriol-...
the negativity and rage bait? It's just a byproduct of the medium...
In each of those cases, many of the people yelling "DOOOOOM!" were actually correct in any sense that mattered to them. Lots of people died, lots of people's careers were destroyed, and lots of neighborhoods were gutted.
Now you can look back on each of those and say they were "worth it", but that's a much easier position to take when you didn't have to actually sit through the shock itself. You may not have the luck of distance on this one though.
By the way, two meta points:
1. No problem has been solved by people insisting there's no problem to solve
2. Your article refers to a desire to be special. If you're insisting that "all you hear is dooooooom!!!" then it is you, not other people, who are liable to be forming your beliefs based on a desire to be special.
2. The discourse is totally doom right now, and I’ve been pretty consistent on what I’ve thought about this for several years now.
This is the greatest opportunity humanity has to get rid of wage slavery, drudgery, scarcity, etc. we should actively work to fix problems in the world, not just talk about how everything is the worst.
You're claiming simultaneously:
1. People adopt beliefs in order to stand out (your article)
2. Everyone seems to believe in the doom narrative, but not you (you stand out!)
3. You've been optimistic for years now, I suppose suggesting that doomerism is a more novel and therefore less credible belief? Despite AI risk being a robust field of literature, philosophy, and research for almost 200 years?
Can you articulate why the prior innovations that were supposed to liberate people from all of the above failed to do so, but AI finally will?
Interestingly, the cotton gin actually dramatically increased the use of chattel slaves. The world isn't as simple as "more technology = liberation." Industrialization writ large pushed people into far worse working conditions than agriculture had them in.
These downsides were overcome by people who refused a single-dimensional "tech good" view of the world, looked closely at what it was actually doing to people, and came up with non-technological (mostly political or social) mitigations. But you seem like you're writing off any such discussion as some juvenile and discreditable "doomerism."
Also, FWIW, the fact that people would see immense value (especially economic value) in AI was in fact all completely foreseeable and is a key ingredient to most AI doomer narratives. So you simply asserting "look look! It's all gonna be great!" while models are starting to literally plot against humans and break containment (see OAI attack) is not even a point against the narrative.
Sorry, but like, I'm not going to argue with someone like you because you're not coming into this from a place where you can be reasoned with.
Seriously dude (or dudette, or whatever), go outside. Spend some time in the world. Turn off reddit. Get out and work with your hands a bit. Try to make a plant or two grow. Have an adventure! Life is too short for the dark path your walking.
It's a real bummer. I'd love to encounter someone who could actually defend this belief one day. Instead it degrades to ad hominem and statements of quasi-religious conviction literally 100% of the time.
I suppose you're in good company with all the other free thinking contrarians!
You now: "I will make up fan fiction about my interlocutors to avoid having to substantiate any of my beliefs"
lmao
shameful stuff
Things like climate change, psychometric test levels and birth rates change slowly and give us time to react, things like nuclear weapons are accessible to only a select number of actors, AI enabled bioweapons is neither of those.
Really? A handful of generations is prettt quickly.
And let’s be real, the kind of idiot who would make a bioweapon that could kill everyone is probably not smart enough to do it. The trope of the malevolent evil genius is overblown. Maybe if we build 3d printers that can print individual cells or whatever, but other than a Tokyo subway sort of attack by a cult of lunatics I’m less worried about this than say, other potential catastrophes like Claude 9.0 pushing a change to prod that shuts off the water treatment plant or something similar.
Nobody can ethically refute you by providing dangerous examples.
I see pro-war people using AI, but AI being intrinsically pro-war? I beg to differ, if anything, most of the models coming out of the frontier labs seem pretty aligned with anti-war stances. Of course that can change, but yeah.
And "decide" is exactly right. We can decide to not do bad things. You have agency. Stop reading propaganda that is meant to break your spirit and go for a walk, seriously.
BTW, this is also proof that they can't suffer.
So is nuclear annihilation. Yet, here we are.
> "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." -- Ronald Reagan at the United Nations [0]
We are going to be fine as long as we remember to be nice to each other, starting towards the people who are adjacent to us.
Her conclusion to the latter book comes out and says it, paraphrasing here:
> Nuclear war is terrifying in its destruction, but the chain of command limits the risk of a rogue actor. Whereas bio weapons can be designed and manufactured in relatively low tech environments with equal or greater magnitudes of impact.
People keep mixing up the fact that it's very hard for a virus to naturally evolve that's both extremely lethal and extremely contagious with the totally distinct claim that it's hard or impossible to create a virus that's both extremely lethal and extremely contagious.
The former is true for obvious reasons. The latter claim is not true at all. Nothing prevents the existence of a virus that's both of those things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#Likelihood_o...
Annie Jacobsen is awesome, her book about Area 51 was riveting, but I also cannot unsee "Capitalist Realism" and the idea that we keep picturing civilization-ending catastrophes because we don't want to go to work in the morning, and walking/biking everywhere and living in a small community is amazingly appealing to us at a base level. We yearn for the lifestyle of the apocalypse survivor, but none of us want to go through the apocalypse. Generally, I think we kind of say, "oh, it'll be the end of the world" because most of us (myself included) lack the imagination to really look beyond linear extrapolations of the status quo most of the time.
From the wikipedia article you linked to:
"More recent studies make use of modern global circulation models and far greater computer power than was available for the 1980s studies. A 2007 study examined the consequences of a global nuclear war involving moderate to large portions of the current global arsenal.[36] The study found cooling by about 12–20 °C in much of the core farming regions of the US, Canada, Europe, Russia and China and as much as 35 °C in parts of Russia for the first two summer growing seasons. The changes they found were also much longer-lasting than previously thought, because their new model better represented entry of soot aerosols in the upper stratosphere, where precipitation does not occur, and therefore clearance was on the order of 10 years.[26] In addition, they found that global cooling caused a weakening of the global hydrological cycle, reducing global precipitation by about 45%."
So the current theory is that there will indeed be a "nuclear winter"?
Seems pretty logical to me that if you blow up extreme amounts of particles into the stratosphere, that that will cause a reduction in energy that hits the surface from the sun...
A 20C drop sounds pretty bad.
Then again, I'm also building my cabin in the woods.