The end of the human race may come in various forms: an external threat (asteroids, The Big Freeze, Big Crunch), an internal threat (nuclear war, natural disasters) and technological threats (artificial intelligence). There are many possibilities to consider when it comes to our inevitable demise.
Stuart Armstrong of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute and Dennis Pamlin of the Global Challenges Foundation recently outlined four potential risks that could extinguish Earthlings. The researchers put the chances of any one of them occurring at just five percent.
Here are the four risks:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Nanotechnology (weapons)
- Global system collapse (economic collapse or societal collapse)
- Synthetic biology (super-organisms)
“The idea that we face a number of global challenges threatening the very basis of our civilization at the beginning of the 21st century is well accepted in the scientific community, and is studied at a number of leading universities. But there is still no coordinated approach to address this group of challenges and turn them into opportunities,” Armstrong and Pamlin wrote in the report.
Although the implications of nanotechnology and synthetic biology have hardly been discussed, an economic collapse and artificial intelligence have been widely talked about. We reported on a daily basis on the various economic figures that confirm a collapse is nearing, while industry professionals forewarn about the dangers of AI (see video below).
Leave a Comment