Saying that we don't need to fear human extinction in the next ten years (or even the next hundred?) does not feel like an extraordinary claim?
> My life is pretty typical, I have a good grasp of what is normal vs weird, and people imagining very different futures with digital people and Al and space travel are indulging themselves in silly sci-fi speculation.
This but unironically
Likewise, one can quite reasonably say there is no credible existential, Hollywood-style threat from AI in the foreseeable future while recognizing far lower-stakes, yet important risks that need to be addressed.
He prevented a catastrophe, but not annihilation. We were not at risk of that in 1962 and even if he had decided to go with the others, more decisions would have been needed (not just his) to fully escalate to full scale nuclear war. I will reiterate: We have never been one decision away from full scale nuclear war.
But in case you don't understand why, it's because no one person can actually launch all the missiles. And considering the two major arsenals (US and USSR), there has never been a time when two people could make the same decision (launch) and actually launch all the missiles. The orders still have to go out and acted on, many decisions have to be made in order to have full scale nuclear war and come close to annihilation.
Stating that the probability is zero when we simply don't know what the probabilities are does seem like an extraordinary claim.
Imagine how reassuring it would be to people if we had evidence that there's no existential risk?
There's an opportunity cost in the doomsday prophesying, though.
The media coverage of "these extremely capable robots might kill us (according to the guys who sell the robots)" comes at the cost of coverage of the real, present issues surrounding the tech oligarchs that we're already facing.
Sure, there are some failure modes that lead to some really bad stuff, but human extinction seems exceedingly unlikely to be one of them, and "10%" is pulled straight out of Dario's derriere.
Far more likely are economic disruptions that impact the tenuous balance between labor and capital and lead to unpredictable societal upheaval.
Nuclear, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Y2K Bug, Global Warming.
No, we aren't going extinct in the next 10 years.