New Lancet Commission provides roadmap to protect economies, security and global stability from catastrophic threats to health and human survival | Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
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Global experts warn that today’s decisions across health, finance, climate, defense and security sectors will determine how many years of good health future generations gain – or lose – to preventable illness and early death by 2100.
  • magnue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    20 hours ago

    Nice. Should be able to get my life over and done with before all that.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    It doesn’t look like the article as a whole is downloadable without an account, but from what is accessible:

    The Commission identifies two threats as having extinction-potential:

    • The malicious use of artificial intelligence (AI)
    • Nuclear conflict

    I think that it’s reasonably likely that by 2100, we will have at least two other potential candidates (if we aren’t there already):

    • Engineered, self-replicating biological organisms that create pandemics or other situations problematic to human life (e.g. if we produced something like the Great Oxidation Event on a short timeframe). We are increasingly able to craft and modify life, and I would expect that we will explore all sorts of possibilities.
    • Self-replicating nanomachines that do similar; something like the gray goo scenario.

    In all cases other than nuclear conflict, I think that rapid replication that spirals out of control is the common factor that could render a risk existential.

    I also do not think that the most-likely existential risk from AI comes from intentional, malicious use—the article is specifically identifying malicious use—but from an error coupled with a system that can expand massively and spin out of control. Something more like the paperclip maximizer scenario.

    • Strider@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      15 hours ago

      Don’t forget the environment. Statistics have been massively wonky for a few years now with massive derailing happening this year (eg https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2). At the rate we’re going it is more likely to be surprising we’ll not have some events with massive death tolls until 2100.

      But yeah, AI might cause suffering but won’t be any sci-fi doomsday scenario without some human driving it (point being less an AI issue but more on the political/regulation side. Anything else just beintlg the medium to oppress with power).

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2·
        15 hours ago

        It was intentional not to include it. I don’t think that global warming likely poses an existential threat. It may impose high costs on humanity, greater than the benefit of burning fossil fuels, and thus be something that we want to avoid, but I don’t think that we’d likely put ourselves in a scenario where humanity doesn’t survive.

        Existential threats are specifically those that end humanity’s existence.