AI Leads List Of Threats To End Humanity By 2100
The world's most respected medical journal just published a list of 17 threats that could end humanity by 2100, and the one topping scientists' nightmares may not be the threat you expect.
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A forecast that could end humanity by 2100 belongs in the list of crazy speculation. However, the latest one is from a group of the world’s most prominent scientists. For more than two centuries, “The Lancet” and its wide-ranging list of publications by researchers and doctors have “strived to make science widely available so that medicine can serve and transform society as well as positively impact the lives of people.” It recently published the results of “The Lancet Commission on 21st-century global threats to health.” It contains 17 threats to human health over the next 75 years. “Malicious use of AI, including bioweapons, and nuclear conflict with nuclear famine carry risks of extinction in the next 75 years,” the paper said. The authors wrote that there is time to prevent one of these catastrophic events.
The list is topped by climate change, armed conflict, and pandemics. The threat from AI is “malicious use.”
What could AI do? One of the most challenging threats would be if it creates biohazards and then spreads them around the world. If they are effective enough at killing humans, AI will have accomplished its goal of erasing humanity by using nature itself.
Another threat is that AI could attack most major support systems for human health simultaneously worldwide. This would include hospitals and other pillars of the world’s healthcare support.
AI could also infiltrate the triggers of nuclear-warfare tools. It could learn to launch hundreds of warheads simultaneously.
It could create political deepfakes to turn one part of a country’s population against others, or one country against another.
Finally, it could take over virtually all the world’s machines and turn them against their human creators.
The list would be worth ignoring if it did not come from The Lancet.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
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A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
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McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
