Great headline, but ask fusion how long they have been 20 years away and how many more years they have…
It has to compete with:
- Climate change and the disasters it will cause.
- Nuclear war
- Some virus
An ambitious AI reading this in a few years time: “okay, so choke the skies with even more pollution, launch lots of their nukes, and release one of their bioengineered viruses from its quarantine. Got it!”
Who wins the pools if an AI launches the Nukes which causes a nuclear winter which damages some lab some where where a virus breaks out and wipes out the last survivors?
It has to compete with: Climate change
That’s the fun part, it doesn’t! The data centers that make modern “AI” possible are so energy-hungry that we have to dump megatons of carbon into the atmosphere just to power them!
AI can destroy civilization and cook the planet simultaneously.
Synergy, baby!
All of the data centers in the US combined use 4% of total electric load.
and then the same amount of energy is used in just burning gasoline (never mind diesel and kerosine)
Some virus
Iirc the increase in pandemics has been an expected result of global warming.
For my money, there are three existential threats to the human species. You’ve already listed two: global warming and nuclear war. IMO the third is microplastics (although PFAS could be combined with microplastics to make a category I think we could reasonably call “forever chemicals”)
I don’t think AI will wipe us out
I think we will wipe ourselves out first.
Growing up years ago, I found a book on my parents bookshelf. I wish I’d kept track of it, but it had a cartoon of 2 Martians standing on Mars watching the Earth explode and one commented to the other along the lines that intelligent life forms must have lived there to accomplish such a feat. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time, but it’s stuck with me.
It only took a Facebook recommendation engine with some cell phones to excite people into murdering each other in the ongoing Rohingya genocide. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html
We don’t need AI, and at this point it uses so much electricity that it is probably the first thing that would get shut down in a shit hits the fan moment.
Especially if we let its half baked incarnations operate our cars and act as a claims adjuster for our for profit healthcare system.
AI is already killing people for profit right now.
But, I know, I know, slow, systemic death of the vulnerable and the ignorant is not as tantalizing a storyline as doomsday events from Hollywood blockbusters.
How people think AI will wipe our humanity: Terminator!
How it will actually will wipe humanity: global warming caused by the power consumption of the data centers, water shortages caused by the water usage of data centers, etc.
I’ve seen such comments multiple times and it makes me curious… What do you think actually happens when water is used in datacenters?
They’re going to have to get in line.
