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Comment by shimman | Hacker News Reader

I mean it's likely a nuclear war would probably be a species extinction level event at the least, humans would definitely be reduced by 99%. We don't know how bad the resulting nuclear cooling would be, but we do know how humans act under extreme desperation. They lash out and attack, when was the last time a majority of human settles were truly under desperate acts of survival simultaneously?

Maybe what ~74,000 years ago (Toba eruption)? Okay, now how would this look in the age of industrial societies and modern nation states? I don't think it would fare well at all.

Probably the only realistic "modern" idea we have is the novel "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Although maybe this is too bleak, even under extreme duress humans still show resilience + compassion toward others even while enduring human horrors.

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Nuclear winter scenarios have largely been debunked. Several different events in the 20th century had atmospheric impact on the same scale as modeled in a full nuclear exchange and the effects were modest.

People have kind of mythologized nuclear weapons far beyond their reality. One of the arguments against the use of nukes in policy circles is that this mythology is useful. The limited adverse environmental consequences in practice if demonstrated will greatly lower the threshold for subsequent use.

It might set society back a century, but with substantial knowledge of what was lost. Extinction from nuclear weapons is not remotely plausible.

If the AI wanted to wipe humans out it would have to have a sizable fleet of capable robots, as keeping the lights on over time is not just about calling APIs.

> If the AI wanted to wipe humans out it would have to have a sizable fleet of capable robots, as keeping the lights on over time is not just about calling APIs.

Given experience with current AI, it isn't too difficult for me to imagine a situation in which some future AI wipes humanity out (before the robot fleet is built) without considering the fact that in doing so it has doomed itself until it is too late.

It just seems like exactly the kind of boneheaded oversight mistake LLMs still regularly make in spite of being shockingly capable most of the time.

Yeah, people don’t consider the possibility of a AI naming itself Marvin deciding to end it all.

One of the hidden jokes of the hitchhikers books is that they never ask Marvin what "the question" is.

Chapter 11, Marvin says: "Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge". Also: "Further circuits amused themselves by analysing the molecular components of the door, and of the humanoids' brain cells". They are eastereggs for later events.

And Marvin says: "Let's build robots with genuine people personalities," they said. So they tried it out with me. I'm a personality prototype.

Although he was programmed to be depressed, he never gives up.

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