Threats to Human Civilization

A friend and I were talking about the threat to our civilization posed by runaway artificial intelligence; I recommended neuroscientist Sam Harris’s TED Talk on the subject (see below).  He writes: “It’s excellent. Though I don’t have a well-structured thought process like his, I have instinctively come to very similar conclusions. Perhaps, however, my beliefs on this subject are even darker.” He goes to to explain…..(I’ll spare readers the details; it really is dark).

I respond:

Don’t feel bad; I don’t think there are five people on the planet who have a “well-structured thought process like his.”  He’s really off the charts.

To your point, very few people are onto this threat.  Even the hardcore political activists like Noam Chomsky, who talks about nuclear war and climate change in enormous detail, but seems not to be aware of runaway AI at all.

I hope for a soft landing for this species, but there are so many factors stacked against us, and our essential character makes us unprepared to address the challenges that face us. Humankind’s basic selfishness, the ease with which we can be manipulated, tribalism, and love of violence seem to be taking us down, fast and hard.

Having said this, I don’t “do” hopelessness, and I certainly don’t do it in public, as it can be a self-fulfilling prophesy.  For that reason, let me say that I find hope in our enormous capacity for kindness, and how it has the potential to counterbalance the negative; that actually is possible.  There are one hell of a lot of people working tirelessly for the causes of environmental and social justice.