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> He's pretty sure that human civilization will be extinct this century. If they are, it'll almost certainly[1] be climate change or nuclear war, it won't be A

• toth 3y ago
  There is no scenario where climate change leads to human extinction. Worst case scenario is global population goes down by a single digit percentage. Horrible, horrible stuff, but not extinction. And most likely scenarios are not nearly that bad. Nuclear war, if the worst nuclear winter predictions are correct, could be a lot worse but there would still be some survivors. Unaligned ASI though, could actually make us extinct.
  • bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    it said end of civilization? >Horrible, horrible stuff, but not extinction. anyway climate change drop single percentage directly caused, but that kind of thing seems like it would have LOTS of side effects.
  • kylebyte 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure the worst case of your nuclear war scenario is actually the worst case of the climate change one. Chunks of the world suddenly becoming unlivable and resources getting more scarce sounds like a recipe for escalation into war to me.
    • ethanbond 3y ago
      The nuclear war scenario, according to all known information about nuclear war policies, is not “chunks of the world becoming unlivable.” The principals in a nuclear conflict do not appear to even have a method to launch just a few nukes in response to a nuclear attacks: they will launch thousands of warheads at hundreds of cities.
      • ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        I suppose thousands of warheads could be launched at hundreds of cities, and that could make chunks of the world uninhabitable and kill millions climate change will happen, and it will do that, left unchecked
        • ethanbond 3y ago
          I'm not arguing whatsoever against action on climate change, I'm just articulating actually how bad a nuclear exchange would be. It's far, far, far worse than most people imagine because they (understandably) couldn't fathom how monstrous the actual war plans were (and are, as far as anyone knows). Daniel Ellsberg, the top nuclear war planner at RAND during the Cold War, claims that the Joint Chiefs gave an estimate to Kennedy in 1961 that they'd expect 600,000,000 deaths from the US's war plan alone. That's 600 million people: 1. At 1960s levels of urban populations (especially in China, things have changed quite a lot -- and yes the plan was to attack China... every moderately large city in China, in fact!) 2. Using 1960s nuclear weapons 3. Not including deaths from the Russian response (and now Chinese), at the time estimated to be 50 - 90 million Americans 4. Before the global nuclear winter
          • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
            That's not extinction, that's not even close. Maybe, just maybe, it'd be the end of both western and eastern civilization, but it's nowhere near wiping out all life on Earth.
            • ethanbond 3y ago
              I don’t think anyone suggested it was
      • kylebyte 3y ago
        I was unclear, I meant chunks of the world becoming unlivable from climate change could easily be the catalyst for a nuclear war. So the worst case for both is the same in my mind.
  • shafyy 3y ago
    What is ASI and how could it make humans extinct?
    • concordDance 3y ago
      Artifical Super Intelligence. Could make humans extinct just like humans could make chimpanzees extinct. Using superior intellect to better leverage available resources than the things it/they are competing with until it out expands/outcompetes them.
      • TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Note that ways ASI can make us extinct includes all the ways we could do it to ourselves. One of the possible scenario is tricking humans into starting WWIII, perhaps entirely by accident. Another is that even being benignly applied to optimize economic activity in broad terms might have the AI strengthen the very failure modes that accelerate climate change. Point being, all the current global risks won't disappear overnight with the rise of a powerful AI. The AI might affect them for the better, or for worse, but the definition of ASI/AGI is that whichever way it will affect them (or anything in general), we won't have the means to stop it.
        • shafyy 3y ago
          > One of the possible scenario is tricking humans into starting WWIII This sounds more like a plot of a third-grade movie than something that could happen in reality.
          • NoGravitas 3y ago
            It's the plot of the Terminator franchise (more or less; in the Terminator franchise, the AGI was given permission to launch on its own authority, as it was believed to be aligned with US military interests. But before that, it tricked humans into building the automated factory infrastructure that it would later use to produce Terminators and Hunter-Killers.).
          • 3y ago
  • devnonymous 3y ago
    Climate change has compounding effects (eg: water scarcity, leading to political conflict, leading to displacement, leading to pandemics ...and that's just one vector). Real world is real real messy. COViD should have taught people that. Unfortunately, it didn't.
    • toth 3y ago
      I am not saying it's not a huge problem. Hundreds of millions dying would probably make it the worst thing that ever happened. I am just saying it's not an extinction risk.
      • devnonymous 3y ago
        ...tbh, imo, the impact of this is already visible in the world (eg: it can be argued that the conflict in Ukraine is directly linked to climate change) whereas ASI is still fantasy that exists only in the minds of the AI 1% , to use the terminology of the OP.
        • NoGravitas 3y ago
          I believe you are correct on both points. I believe the first major war to be caused substantially by climate change was the Syrian Civil War, followed by the Yemeni Civil War. The main AI threats for the foreseeable future are its energy usage contributing to climate change, and the use of generative AI to produce and enhance political unrest, as well as its general use in accelerating other political and economic crises. AGI isn't even on the radar, much less ASI.
    • itsoktocry 3y ago
      >Climate change has compounding effects Why is the default to assume that every change will be negative?
      • devnonymous 3y ago
        Perhaps because we aren't seeing evidence to the contrary?
  • M95D 3y ago
    > He's pretty sure that human civilization will be extinct this century. > There is no scenario where climate change leads to human extinction. He was talking about the human CIVILIZATION...
    • toth 3y ago
      You are right, but "human civilization will be extinct" is an awkward phrase. Human extinction via climate change is off the table. The end of human civilization? Depends on what one means by it. If it means we'll go back to being hunter gatherers it's ridiculous. Some civilizational wide regression is not impossible, but even the direst IUPAC scenario projects only a one digit drop in global GDP (of course, that's the average, it will be much worse in some regions).
      • toth 3y ago
        Sorry, I meant IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change). I don't think IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) has come out with views on impact of global warming :)
        • selimthegrim 3y ago
          They can’t be doing any worse than APS
      • mangosteenjuice 3y ago
        Right, the collapse of our current civilization is inevitable. That doesn't mean it won't be succeeded by more advanced ones in the future
        • M95D 3y ago
          Once it collapses, it won't rise again to even an industrial level civilization. Iron ore, copper, coal are no longer easy-accessible. Can't have a new industrial age without those. We probably need a Foundation (Asimov).
      • 3y ago
  • wcoenen 3y ago
    Climate change and nuclear war are not orthogonal risks. Climate change leads to conflict. For example, the Syria drought of 2006-2010. More climate change leads to larger conflicts, and large conflicts can lead to nuclear exchanges. Think about what happens if India and Pakistan (both nuclear powers) get into a major conflict over water again.
    • toth 3y ago
      I don't disagree with that, but then the risk is nuclear war. It could be triggered by global warming conflicts or by something else. Still, like I said somewhere else, even all out nuclear war is unlikely to lead to human extinction. It could push us back to the neolithic in some scenarios, but even then there is some disagreement about what would happen. Of course, even in the most optimistic scenario it would be really bad and we should do everything we can to avoid it - that goes without saying.
      • ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        Then, actually, the risk is the root cause: climate change, not nuclear war. The global war could be conventional, too. Or chemical, or biological, or genetically engineered. No matter the tool used, the risk is why they would use it vs. not using it now. In any case, besides addressing the root cause vs. proximal cause, you couldn't even address the proximal cause anyways: it's more likely that the world could do something about climate change than about war in general.
        • toth 3y ago
          Well, it's a matter of opinion which one is the root cause. My take is that if you remove nuclear/biological war out of the picture somehow, climate change is not an existential risk. If you remove the latter then the former is still an existential risk (and there are unfortunately a lot of other possible sources of geopolitical instability). So the fundamental source of risk if the former. But it's a matter of opinion. Conventional or chemical warfare, even on a global scale, are definitely not existential risks though. And like I said, probably not even nuclear. Biological... that I could see leading to extinction.
  • api 3y ago
    > There is no scenario where climate change leads to human extinction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis May not be possible with modern deposits but I don’t think we are 100% sure of that, and you asked. We could also probably burn enough carbon to send CO2 levels up where they would cause cognitive impairment to humans if we really didn’t give a damn. That would be upwards of 2000ppm. We probably have enough coal for that if we decide we don’t need Alaska. Of course that would be even more of a species level Darwin Award because we’d see that train coming for a long time.
    • toth 3y ago
      Interesting, I have some vague recollections off hearing about this. But according to your link, IPCC says it's not a plausible scenario in the medium term. And I'd say that even 8 degrees of warming wouldn't be enough for extinction or end of human civilization. But there it could be double digit percentage of human population dying.
  • CuriouslyC 3y ago
    There is a scenario. The climate has been buffering global warming, and as its ability to do that fails, the rate of temperature increase accelerates along with many extreme climate events. This rapid acceleration and series of catastrophes causes a combination of mass migrations along with unprecedented crop failures. First world countries are destabilized by sky high food prices and the mass influx of migrants, leading to a big uptick in wars and revolutions. Eventually mass starvation pushes us into wars for food that quickly spiral into mutual annihilation.
    • germandiago 3y ago
      I always hear all this. Russia has thr biggest surface in the world for a country. A big part of it is frozen... Is that... bad? To give just an example and from my extremely limited knowledge on the topic. But it is a topic that is extremely biased towards some interests anyways
    • mym1990 3y ago
      I don’t think they are arguing that this can’t happen, but that it is unlikely to kill every single human. I mean climate spans very very long time frames, so certainly if we can’t find a way to hang on by a thread and keep reproducing, it will spell the end.
• lampington 3y ago
  > If they are Am I the only one slightly disturbed by the use of "they" in that sentence? I know that the HN commentariat is broad-based, but I didn't realise we already had non-human members ;-)
  • actualwitch 3y ago
    Beep boop
  • NoGravitas 3y ago
    HN wIlegh tlhInganpu', Human.
    • sterlind 3y ago
      wait do you actually speak Klingon?
      • NoGravitas 3y ago
        HISlaH, tlhIngan Hol jIjatlh. (A little anyway. I'm still in the rookie lessons on Duolingo.)
  • danaris 3y ago
    It's perfectly reasonable to refer to "human civilizations" as a plural, since that phrase can very commonly be used to refer to different cultures.
    • jwozn 3y ago
      I believe they are referring to being disturbed by using "they" vs "us", implying they are not a part of human civilization.
• jefftk 3y ago
  AI can make a lot of other risks worse. For example, say someone asks GPT5 (or decensored Llama-5) how to kill everyone and it patiently and expertly walks them through how to create a global pandemic.
  • api 3y ago
    So ask it how to stop someone from doing this. Ask it how to augment the human immune system. Train AIs on the structures of antibiotics and antiviral drugs and have them predict novel ones. Create an AI that can design vaccines against novel agents. Those things could stop our terrorist and could also stop the next breakout zoonotic virus or “oops!” in a lab somewhere. Intelligence amplification works for everyone. The assumption you’re making is that it only works for people with ill intent. The assumption behind all this is that intelligence is on balance malevolent. This is a result of humans and their negativity bias. We study history and the negative all jumps out at us. The positive is ignored. We remember the holocaust but forget the green revolution, which saved many more people than the holocaust killed. We see Ukraine and Gaza and forget that fewer people per capita are dying in wars today by far than a century ago. We should be thinking about destructive possibilities of course. Then we should use these intelligence amplifiers to help us prevent them.
    • tumult 3y ago
      You've also made an assumption. That attack vs. react is is symmetrical. It's not.
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      There is no symmetry between destruction and creation/prevention of destruction, destruction is far easier.
      • api 3y ago
        The resources are also asymmetrical. The number of people who want to do doomsday levels of harm is small and they are poorly resourced compared to people who want benevolent outcomes for at a minimum their own groups. There are no guarantees obviously, but we have survived our technological adolescence so far largely for this reason. If the world were full of smart comic book nihilists we would be dead by now. Even without AI our continued technological advancement will keep giving us more and more power, as individuals and especially groups. If we don’t think we can climb this mountain without destroying ourselves then it means the entire scientific and industrial endeavor was when we signed our own death warrant, AI or not. You can order CRISPR kits.
• itsoktocry 3y ago
  >If they are, it'll almost certainly[1] be climate change or nuclear war, it won't be AI. If we go extinct in the next 100 years, it's not going to be from climate change. How would that even work?
  • jchanimal 3y ago
    Agricultural pressure is one of the strongest predictors of unrest. Imagine that but not localized.
  • jncfhnb 3y ago
    Human extinction is not on the table. Societal collapse could be.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • hutzlibu 3y ago
    Basically, climate change would creates lots of problems, lots of hungry immigrants. And right now we are already close to a nuclear war, so climate change would not directly wipe out humanity.
    • qerti 3y ago
      Warming the climate would increase the amount of arable land. Sea level rise happens very slowly, so most people don’t need to travel abroad to avoid it.
      • hutzlibu 3y ago
        It can also lead to more desertification and erosion, which I believe is rather the current trend.
      • TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > Warming the climate would increase the amount of arable land. You mean land that would be arable at some far point in the future. The land reclaimed from ice isn't going to be arable in short-to-mid term - it's going to be a sterile swamp. It will take time to dry off, and more time still for the soil to become fertile.
• lettergram 3y ago
  zero chance climate change (1-2 degree increase) would end humanity. 5-10 probably wouldn’t end humanity lol Nuclear war would probably kill 80-90% but even then wouldn’t kill humanity. Projections I’ve seen are only like 40-50% of the countries hit. AI is scary if they tie it into everything and people slowly stop being capable. Then something happens, and we can’t boil water. Beyond that scenario I don’t see the risk this century.
  • digdugdirk 3y ago
    That's an incredibly confident statement that very much misses the point. 50% loss of the global human population means we don't come back to the current level of technological development. 80-90% means we go back to the stone age. Photosynthesis stops working at temperatures very close to our current high temps. Pollen dies at temperatures well within those limits - we're just lucky we haven't had massive heatwaves at those times in the year. People need to understand that climate change isn't a uniform bumping up of the thermostat - it's extra thermal energy that exists in a closes system. That extra energy does what it wants, when it wants, in ways we can't currently accurately predict. It could be heatwaves that kill off massive swaths of global food production. Or hurricanes that can spin up and hit any coastline at any time of year. Or a polar vortex that gets knocked off the pole and sits over an area of the globe where the plant and animal life has zero ability to survive the frigid temperatures. It's not a matter of getting to wear shorts more often. We're actively playing russian roulette with the future of humanity.
    • oceanplexian 3y ago
      The Earth was full of plants 65 million years ago when the atmosphere had like 4000PPM of CO2. most of those plants are still around. The people saying plants will stop photosynthesis are taking you for a ride. Climate Change might certainly have some negative effects but “plants won’t exist” is not one of them.
      • 4bpp 3y ago
        It's the "arguments as soldiers" pattern. The idea that global warming will make plants incapable of photosynthesis helps the cause of fighting against global warming. You wouldn't betray the cause by refuting the idea ("stabbing your own soldiers in the back"), would you?
• johnnyworker 3y ago
  Companies and three-letter agencies have persecuted environmental activists by all sorts of shitty means for decades, using "AI" to completely bury them online will be a welcome tool for them, I'm sure. As it is for totalitarian governments. It's generally really weird to me how all these discussions seem to devolve into whataboutism instantly, and how that almost always takes up the top spots and most of the room. "Hey, you should get this lump checked out, it might be cancer!" "Oh yeah? With the crime in this city, I'm more likely to get killed for my phone than die of cancer". What does that achieve? I mean, if people are so busy campaigning against nuclear proliferation or climate change that they have not a single spare cycle to consider additional threats, fine. But then they wouldn't be here, they wouldn't have the time for it, so.