I am very worried about AI as well. On the bright side, perhaps one human party will use weaponised weak AI to exterminate all other human competition (and then stop developing) before strong AI arises to forever enslave or eliminate all of humanity.
I think technology has given humanity too much power when it's clear we have no wisdom. Global problems could be easily solved if we were all decent enough to act with collective intelligence. I see no way to make us wiser in time, and having opened Pandora's box with no way to turn back time, I think we're basically screwed.
Cool, well I guess we're both along for the same ride, so time will tell!
Do you have any guess on a timeline for when this all goes down? It sounds like you're hinting that this is all inevitable, so does that mean you don't support any sort of environmental regulation or conservation efforts since those would be drops in the bucket and the total destruction is inevitable anyway?
I still support environmental efforts - a tiny chance is not zero chance, and perhaps fate will intervene in some surprising way to help us out a little.
Even if we're fully screwed, I would like people to appreciate what we are, what we have lost and what we are losing, that alone makes environmental/AI education worth it for me.
I see what you're saying and why you're pessimistic about it. We've somehow managed to make it this far despite nuclear and biological weapons where messing up once leads to ending it all. That could be entirely due to luck--or maybe our institutions and society is more robust than it appears.
I tend not to think we'll wipe ourselves out environmentally because even if the entire world took the path of China (which I'd consider the worst-case scenario), we'd be living with a toxic air soup and poisoned rivers but still living. Clearly that's not a world or life I want, however. Humans are perhaps bad at estimating true risk, and there is an asymmetry in outcomes here--better economy and material prosperity with some environmental destruction vs possible total annihilation if the environment is destroyed too much--so it could make sense to be more conservative regarding the environment than the naive utility calculations might show.
Changing topics slightly, do you consider AI as one of these existential threats? I consider it one and could easily imagine the science fiction scenarios where autonomous machines consume and harvest entire planets for more resources. Plus even if it doesn't lead to this apocalypse, at a minimum you're looking at billions of people who suddenly have to change how they live/work/etc. As a another aside, what do you consider the solution to environmental problems? Is it even possible or feasible for humans in an industrial society to give up their profligate lifestyles?