assure you that unless we change EVERYTHING about how we live, the statistical probability of one or more extinction level events happening in the next 25 years is nearly 100%. AI won’t fix our biological fertility decline in time to reverse it. AI isn’t going to change Putin, the Ayatollahs, or Xi Jinping. There are five known risks from AI, one of those is that it will be used by evil people to do evil things. Given history, can we discount that?
AI won’t solve the debt issue, or the fact that humans persist in creating diseases that are increasingly impossible to control. Robotics can’t solve our fertility issues, and it has been suggested that in two generations, humans will ‘marry’ robots because there simply won’t be enough people left. I suppose the next suggestion would be that, as Aldous Huxley predicted, there will only be test tube babies.
Someone once said that Abraham Lincoln would be amazed by the technology deployed during Desert Storm, but he wouldn’t be surprised by the evil of Sadam Hussein. Human Nature is baked into our DNA, and Artificial Intelligence can’t change that. The question is whether we can, or if we’ve gone too far and it will be left to a remnant to solve.
There have always been doomsday scenarios. Most of them are isolated conspiracy theories, muddled and obscure in their accusations of Luciferian organizations, or the unclear fear of some foreign power invading us. Things have changed. We currently have multiple, credible existential threats with plausible windows of time within which they come to fruition. I started charting these potentials more than forty years ago, focusing on our growing national debt and anticipated decline in population demographics. Even then, it was obvious that the metrics of those subjects appeared to converge in the proximity of 2030. My most common question was: “What is the solution?”
The answer I received was always, “They will figure something out when we get there.”
There was never the suggestion that we halt the velocity or trajectory of these concerns by changing our behavior. The pathologically fatalist answer was to continue on our foolish path until a collapse was near, then, at the last minute, some future group of people will find a way around the problem.
That time grows near, so very near, and if anything we have even more extinction level threats than were ever anticipated. Forty years ago there was no concern over Cyber-attacks, artificial intelligence threats, crushing infertility, chemical contamination, scientific experiments enhancing viruses, and our ability to conduct inconsequential warfare using the mass destruction of civilizations without ever employing a soldier or bomb. Those threats were not part of our experience. Now they are present reality and as we add those metrics to the chart that illustrates our threat, they seem to all converge in the period between 2030 and 2050.
Inconsequential war you ask? Yes. Destroying a civilization used to mean physical destruction and the people in power were also at mortal risk. Now our leaders have isolated themselves to the point where the pushing of a button could wipe out hundreds of millions of people, but the elites have created refuges for themselves and their cronies. They have no fear of a bomb or physical attack. If you destroy populations with cyber or EMP attacks, chemicals, or a virus, the structures remain in place, only the people disappear. It is as if they play a video game, then they go to dinner as millions die. They perceive themselves to be too important to die from the wars they doom others to fight, so they created safe harbors for themselves and their peerage. Thus, they feel no pain from their own actions.
One of the best examples of this is the current threat to the North American electrical grid. We have known of its vulnerability for decades. We are aware that it is being targeted by the Chinese Communist Party and that they have approximately 50,000 active spies, agents, and active military personnel on our soil.
There are three basic categories of ways that the grid could be collapsed: EMP strike, physical assault, cyber-attack. Each of those has a variety of methods, but one strategy would be to destroy a few substations, which would create a cascading surge of energy that would quickly build as it gets promoted from area to area. The most immediately devastating would be an EMP weapon, an electromagnetic pulse. That energy pulse would hit the transmission grid and grow as it travels through the wire, eventually ‘frying’ every component it encounters.
The resulting loss of life in North America over a two-year period would be almost extinction level. Only a small remnant would remain, mostly people from remote areas who were able to hide from the violence and predation. We know what the threat window is, the time frame of proposed attacks has been stated. We have the technology available to prevent this situation, but our leadership has been playing politics with it and we are years late in implementing the solutions.
Human nature.
So, in modern times we see that there are many challenges that threaten humanity. We can look at these challenges and deduce that they result from the way we have moved away from natural living, both personally and as a society. I had this conversation just this morning with a wonderful nurse that I know. She made the statement first, saying, “we have created a world that opposes nature, and we’re now paying for it.”
