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Climate change
OpinionComment
Gwynne Dyer
Gwynne Dyer

Opinion | Don’t fear nuclear war – a killer plague or rogue AI are more likely to end humanity

  • Humanity tends to lack a long-term perspective because there has been little in our evolutionary history that rewards such thinking
  • Long-term strategies can help avert existential threats we create ourselves, such as climate change, lab-engineered viruses and artificial intelligence

Reading Time:3 minutes
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An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on February 5, 2020. Despite heightened fears of nuclear war, given tensions over Ukraine and Taiwan, the biggest threat to human survival is more likely to be artificial intelligence or other ‘human software’. Photo: AFP
Gwynne Dyer
Which would be worse: a global nuclear war with all buttons pressed or real, self-conscious artificial intelligence that goes rogue? You know, the central theme of the Terminator films.
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An AI called Skynet wakes up and immediately realises that humanity could simply switch it off again, so it triggers a nuclear war that destroys most of mankind. The few survivors end up waging a losing war against the machines and extinction. However, this fantasy has too many moving parts, so let’s try again.

Which would be worse: a nuclear “war orgasm” – Herman Kahn’s description of the Pentagon’s nuclear war strategy circa 1960 – or a designer plague created in some secret bioweapons lab? The plague, obviously, because it could theoretically wipe out the human race while all-out nuclear war probably can’t.

The distinction between a 99 per cent wipeout and a 100 per cent wipeout is insignificant if you happen to be one of the victims, but Oxford University philosopher Derek Parfit thought that it actually made a huge difference.

If only 1 per cent of the human race survived, they would repopulate the world in a few centuries. If the human race learned something from its mistake, it might then continue for, say, a million years – the average length of time a mammalian species survives before going extinct.

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China steps up pace in new nuclear arms race with US and Russia

China steps up pace in new nuclear arms race with US and Russia
Even if the human population is limited to 1 billion next time round, that’s a trillion lives in the balance and most of them would probably be worth living. By the way, the climate change problem goes away instantly if you reduce the human population by 99 per cent. Whereas if 100 per cent of the population dies now, all those potential future lives are also lost.
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