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Those are things that pose potential harm to great fractions of humanity (multiple billions of people) but none of them poses any threat to the actual extinctio
by icepush 26d ago
Those are things that pose potential harm to great fractions of humanity (multiple billions of people) but none of them poses any threat to the actual extinction of all humanity.
- elAhmo 26d agoNeither does an LLM model.
- ben_w 25d agoLLMs can already control robots. Today's LLMs are inept at it, but they can do it. Things will be bad, unless someone does something to stop it. Will anyone do that? We don't know. https://xkcd.com/2278/ https://xkcd.com/2278/
- frabcus 25d agoOh indeed, but an LLM model that's reasonably smart could brute force find other training algorithms that are that dangerous. Just as it solves maths problems. This is the explicit plan of OpenAI and Anthropic.
- thomascountz 26d agoThis is not correct. Please go through each one again, taking special note of global warming and nuclear weapon development .
- pingou 26d agoHow is global warning gonna kill all of humanity? Even a full scale nuclear war wouldn't manage that. They could destroy most civilisations, culture and scientific achievements though.
- King-Aaron 26d agoIn the exact same way major sudden changes in the climate have lead to the extinction of the majority of plants an animals over this planets history. We are not special.
- pingou 26d agoWe are special in many ways, we have technology, we are everywhere, and we can think and plan (although considering global warming that is debatable). Global warming would have to create dramatic conditions everywhere on the planet, not leaving any small pocket of survivability to make humans extinct. Possible? Theoretically yes, but pretty unlikely. But obviously extreme global warming would be a catastrophe even if some of humanity survive.
- IsTom 26d agoTechnology depends on a lot of people cooperating around the globe. Disrupt a few critical chains (power generation, fertilizers, computers), add a bit of good old war and you'll soon be in the era before Haber process and a lot of people die. And then the remaining people will have trouble keeping that level of technology with how sudden the change would be.
- pingou 26d agoWell yes that's what I said, it could destroy civilisations and their technology. It seems much harder to kill every isolated tribe in the whole world, and every survivors of the destroyed civilisations.
- jddj 26d agoRunaway greenhouse effects on other planets have resulted in surface temps of 400C+
- pingou 26d agoIs there a possible scenario for that on earth, that results in every place on earth having a temperature non survivable by humans?
- nurumaik 26d agoBecause nuclear war balances itself: more nuclear bombings = less nuclear weapons, less people to send them. It will naturally stop at some fraction of humanity left which is incapable of making and launching more nukes
- Dylan16807 26d agoThe general idea of a nuclear apocalypse is that all the nukes that matter are launched in a matter of hours, and anyone being targeted gets their launches out before they're hit. The feedback loop that slows things down is too late to matter.
- Balinares 26d agoHumans need food. Food does not just appear in supermarkets.
- ben_w 26d agoWhile true, the impact from global warming is likely to be less crops rather than no crops.
- computerphage 26d agoWhy do you think global warming could kill literally every human being? What's the scenario in which that happens?
- mrpopo 26d agoRunaway warming leading to a hot "supergreenhouse" climate was theorized. Alterbatively a snowpiercer scenario creating a snowball earth. Or, once billions of people die from climate change, planetary wars will start on the last hospitable areas, leading to the end of humanity. In contrast, AI ending "humanity" is limited by our own material power, would likely be stoppable, and would not easily reach areas isolated from technology
- pingou 26d agoWhy would it not easily reach areas isolated from technology? If a nefarious AI wins a war, it would be one of the easiest thing for it to locate any survivors anywhere on the planet.
- ben_w 25d agoI suspect you two are discussing different AI. I think you (and I, and everyone who wants AI development to pause while we catch up with the implications at least) is looking where the ball is going. I have the general (non specific to anyone in this thread) impression that people who think it can't end humanity, are looking where the ball is today. Current AI obviously can't "locate any survivors anywhere on the planet". Where the ball is going… well, much as I don't believe Musk's timelines for anything, he is trying to sell his Optimus robots as a "robot army", about them running factories, about factories on the moon etc. I suspect the moon-factory "idea" was someone asking Grok, given how the numbers don't really work for building compute as well as power, but the scale of that is enough to change Earth's equilibrium temperature by… I forget, but IIRC it's many tens of Kelvin rather than single-K from global warming if this was all put in LEO for some reason.
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- icepush 26d agoGlobal warming is happening at a slow enough pace that there is plenty of time for people to move to the poles/into caves/beneath the ocean/whatever. Nuclear war would be much more destructive in a much shorter range of time but you will have pockets.
- toilet 26d agoClimate change isn't real because we can just move under the oceans hahahaha
- icepush 26d agoIf you read my comment very carefully, you will find that is not exactly what I claimed
- thomascountz 26d agoCitation needed for evidence of human cooperation at this scale. As you say, climate change is slow moving, and there's no real evidence across the last 60 years of knowing about it suggesting humans are willing to do what it takes to survive it.
- ben_w 26d agoAll human behaviour since no later than the Polynesians turned the Pacific islands into a network of sailing trade routes. "Humans move" is one of the easiest things to predict. The biggest problem today is that they generally move to somewhere that other humans are already in, which is of course rather lessened by any major disaster wiping out a majority of the population.
- icepush 25d agoWhat cooperation are you referring to?
- thomascountz 25d ago...people to move to the poles/into caves/beneath the ocean/whatever Cooperation required for the purported mass migration of civilization. Admittedly, I assumed you meant it would be civil, but perhaps that should be excluded from the priors.
- s1artibartfast 25d agoI would much rather take my chances with either over AI. Both at once.
- xienze 25d agoHumans are voluntarily driving themselves to extinction through sub-replacement birth rates worldwide. That's going to play out far quicker than global warming or pretty much anything other than every country on earth launching nukes at each other will.
- kakacik 25d agoHard disagree here, population growth is still happening and will keep happening for some time, maybe step out of your bubble if you don't see that. Africa is still growing massively for example, world is not just western civilization. Sure at that rate and incerase of living conditions for everybody maybe in 1000 years population will be smaller, but its not that hard to fix if wanted - people used to have 10-15 kids as default.
- XorNot 26d agoArguing whether "all" or just "most" of humans dying is certainly a choice. Survival of the species isn't enough.
- yoble 25d agoIn prioritizing risks I do feel it's a genuine qualitative difference though. Number of humans going to 1 million would be huge catastrophe, but after a few thousand years it gets back up to billions of people, renewed every generation. Number of humans going to 0 means that's it. One scenario has many orders of magnitude more missing humans, when you count future lives.
- CalRobert 25d agoOcean deoxygenation comes to mind.