[Article] “What could an AI-caused existential catastrophe actually look like?” by Benjamin Hilton

The recording may not reflect the most recent changes to this article.

At 5:29 AM on July 16, 1945, deep in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, the Manhattan Project carried out the world’s first successful test of a nuclear weapon.

From that moment, we’ve had the technological capacity to wipe out humanity.

But if you asked someone in 1945 to predict exactly how this risk would play out, they would almost certainly have got it wrong. They may have thought there would have been more widespread use of nuclear weapons in World War II. They certainly would not have predicted the fall of the USSR 45 years later. Current experts are concerned about India–Pakistan nuclear conflict and North Korean state action, but 1945 was before even the partition of India or the Korean War.

That is to say, you’d have real difficulty predicting anything about how nuclear weapons would be used.

Narrated by the author.

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First published:
August 24th, 2022

Source:
https://80000hours.org/articles/what-could-an-ai-caused-existential-catastrophe-actually-look-like