Doom: A guide

      A desturbing “end of days” scenario has been much discussed in recent years—most recently because it is fleshed out in a new book co-written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. 

      Perhaps, therefore, this would be a good time to remind ourselves that human beings seem to have been discussing the imminence of doom more or less since the arrival of language.

      I’m talking wipe-out-all-humanity-level doom: the whole world getting flooded, not just a run of unsuccessful hunts.

      Doom today wouldn’t just be some murderous fires in LA or another big tsunami. A tyrant taking over the oldest continuing democracy and most powerful country on earth might qualify, however, especially if you live there.

      But most doom scenarios are not local or even political. They imagine the Big One: all humanity—even vegans, including Elon Musk’s entire gene pool—deep-sixed. Gone.

      For much of the history of civilization the likely perpetrator of such an End-of-Time Doom was said to be some sort of “higher power” who would finally and conclusively have lost patience with our failures to get the prayers right and our tendency to want to have lots of sex, some of it weird.

      In other words, a fed-up Yahweh or Allah or Brahman or Jehovah would terminate his human experiment: “Well, it seemed a good idea at the time, but you think Sodom and Gomorrah were bad? Have you checked out PornHub?”

      In the past few centuries, we humans, in our miserableness, have progressed to the point where we might accomplish Doom: The Final Episode all by ourselves: making the planet unlivable by our intense and sustained befouling: by burning coal, with industrial pollutants, with pesticides (DDT in particular), through automobile exhausts.

      We have cleaned up some of the above, but not nearly enough. The oceans seem, increasingly, a mess. And the major Pollution Doom scenario recently has been the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere: letting sunlight in but not heat out.

      And, the world is indeed getting noticeably toastier, so Climate Doom—humanity frying— seems increasingly possible. Indeed, that has moved to the top of most doom charts.

      But there are other contenders, including Yudkowsky’s intriguing new one: AI Doom.

      Though it is much less discussed as a doom-bringer in recent decades, the number of countries that have nuclear weapons—and, therefore, the capacity to kill hundreds of millions of people and rain radioactivity on the planet—keeps increasing. And the buttons that would release the most nukes are now under the fingers of, gulp, Xi, Trump and Putin. Atomic Doom.

      For a time we also lived with the Malthusian threat of the human population growing to the point where it outstrips the food supply. Starvation Doom. There is still much too much hunger in the world but, by most measures, less.  

      And some developed countries are now facing the threat of a declining population. Indeed, nowadays, the richer the country the lower the birthrate tends to be. Extinction of the species due to lack of reproduction is, for some, a new doom nightmare.

     The problem apparently being too few guys ready to take their eyes off their video games and porn long enough to chat up, let alone marry, a real, in-person gal or guy.   

      Meanwhile, too few women, having finally earned the right to hold not just challenging and difficult but paid jobs, are willing to undertake their (un)fair share of the additional burden of raising those conceivable children. Indeed, large numbers of modern females are deterred even by the burden of cohabiting with someone who manifests mostly in Fortnite.

      So, too little sex is now squeezing out too much sex in our scenarios: Nonintercourse Doom.

      And, on top of all this, our multiple environmentally unsound behaviors have apparently led to a shortage of bees, which, oops, turn out to be needed to pollinate the plants that produce all the fruits, vegetables and nuts we eat. Though I’ll admit Bee-Less Doom has not been heavily fretted over.

      Still, one might think we were fully and thoroughly doomed up. But that apparently was not the case. We now have a new doom—a doom so large those who worry about it are called “doomers.”

      The horror-movie scenario, as most of you know, is:

·      Faust-like humans selfishly but naively create machines smart enough to take over all sorts of tasks requiring smarts: from writing to drawing to—dun da DON don—programming.

·      Then those machines get so smart and adept at programming and eventually at manufacturing clones of themselves and improvements on themselves that . . .

 (A) they realize they don’t need earth-polluting, sex- (or video game-) obsessed humans around anymore to muck everything up.

And (B) as Cassandra Yudkowsky—who has replaced Malthus, Rachel Carson, Bertrand Russell, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg as Doomer # 1—puts it, “They kill us all.” Our new mechanical overlords, with their silicon brains, devise and distribute a poison or a virus. Then (C) it is just a question of getting rid of eight-million or so bodies and dealing with all those lonely dogs and cats.

·      And humankind would be kaput—for real this time. AI Doom.

     This, I should note, is a close cousin of Extraterrestrial Doom, with impatient aliens as the perpetrators—long a favorite subject of science fiction, of which Eliezer is a big fan.

     Is it possible one of these dooms could actually happen?

     Perhaps one could. We are fragile—as anyone who has ever grown old has realized. And our pyramids, towers and rocket ships are insignificant compared to asteroids, moons and planets—let alone suns, black holes and galaxies. We’d barely qualify as collateral damage if one of the above got in the way of another of the above.

     And we do need to worry about, the unintended consequences of our technological advances. We are safer and better off thanks to the cautions, the crusades of Malthus, Rachel Carson, Bertrand Russell, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg.

     If there weren’t a Yudkowsky, we’d have to, uh, invent one

     But the universe operates on very large time scales. We don’t. We don’t have to worry much about what may prove to be once-in-a-few-thousand-years events.

      Myself, I’m more concerned about my own Personal Doom and that of loved ones, which, I’m told, is inevitable and decreasingly far away.