Comment by thomascountz
4 hours ago
This is not correct. Please go through each one again, taking special note of global warming and nuclear weapon development .
4 hours ago
This is not correct. Please go through each one again, taking special note of global warming and nuclear weapon development .
Why do you think global warming could kill literally every human being? What's the scenario in which that happens?
Runaway 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
Why 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.
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There's a lot to unpack with this, and I am not an expert, but: crop failure across industrial monocrops leads to food shortages, wild fires destroy significant areas which support pollinator ecologies, fresh water become contaminated by rising sea water and blighted by drought, and perhaps most significantly, as resources become strained, humans become desperate and armed conflict proliferates. This is just top of mind.
None of those are "all"/extinction.
Bad, sure; I wish they were not present to threaten us, but they are not close to "all".
Humans are extremely resilient omnivores. We are able to eat a huge range of things from algae to zebra, and get food (farmed and hunted) from salt water as well as fresh.
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Worst case is warming oceans create a hypoxic environment where anaerobic bacteria thrive en masse and generate H2S over country-scale areas undersea. The chemocline breaches the surface and the ocean and atmosphere become poisonous to most complex life and agriculture, also stripping the ozone layer in the process, irradiating the surface. This is one mechanism posited for the end-permian mass extinction that eradicated most ocean and surface life, including the trilobites.
Not sure how long we'd survive such a scenario, even sheltering underground. But surely it couldn't happen to us.
(However, it now seems like the AI might get us first.)
Global warming causing war between nuclear armed opponents. Migration flows and competition over ever shrinking resources.
It's silly to treat these things as separate categories as if only one will happen at a time. These issues are happening, and are going to happen all at once. That is the fundamental challenge. AI plays into that because it can make wars and nuclear exchanges so much more effective.
If an AI tells the President the USA can survive China's nuclear barrage mostly unschathed, perhaps he'll press the button...
Global 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.
People already entrenched near the poles will fight to keep others out. Right-wing anti-immigrant parties are on the rise right now already.
They also tend to not want to recognise climate change -- because that would imply that people could migrate because of it.
Citation 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.
All 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.
What cooperation are you referring to?
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Climate change isn't real because we can just move under the oceans hahahaha
If you read my comment very carefully, you will find that is not exactly what I claimed
How 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.
Because 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
The 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.
In 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.
We 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.
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We have a massive survival range and we're on every continent. That kind of sudden climate change is not nearly enough to wipe us out. Some other climate scenarios might. Nuclear war definitely could.
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Humans need food. Food does not just appear in supermarkets.
While true, the impact from global warming is likely to be less crops rather than no crops.
I would much rather take my chances with either over AI. Both at once.
Humans 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.
Hard 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.