Walking through South London this morning getting my 10,000 steps in whilst listening to a podcast assessing the likelihood of the AI apocalypse it occurred to me that I am now a seasoned survivor of such existential angst.
Not like a Sudanese or a resident of Kiev of course, but in a more gentle, first world, middle class sort of way.
Being 64, my list of existential fears goes back to a nuclear apocalypse during the cold war at the hands of the Russians – or Americans if you still insist the west is the main source of evil in the world.
To be fair, when I was younger and more stupid I shared that perspective and had that famous Thatcher and Reagan poster on the wall of my student bedroom. A lovely image to go to sleep with and perhaps why my mind tends to dwell on an ‘end-game’ whilst also pragmatically planning and working towards a future that end game suggested would not arrive.
I suppose this is part of the human condition and in the past the angst came in the form of a sabre tooth tiger or attack by the tribe down the road. So maybe we are programmed to look for these threats for survival and if they are not there then make them up in the form of horror stories and bogey men.
And as a white male who has lived in some of the richest places in the world at a time of unmatched peace I have never had to fill the angst-gap with the fear of rape, war, pestilence, enslavement or in other words, the more traditional day to day worries of our species and especially of woman, minorities and the poor.
But there is a difference between those worries which are personal and over which I might have some agency (don’t go far from the camp fire at night if sabre tooth tigers are your main concern) and nuclear holocaust over which I had very little agency.
I say now I had no agency, but of course, back in the day I joined CND and attended a march or two but that was as much about signalling and belonging than thinking I was really changing anything.
Nuclear holocaust means everyone dies, not just me. My family, my friends, our civilization and probably the species. It’s a different type of threat.
And so is the fear of death by AI, whether delivered by lethal drones or artificial viruses as I was reminded by my podcast this morning. I and my family may still be more likely to be hit by the 187 bus, but that seems to demand no special thought beyond taking care and teaching others to do the same.
I realise that ‘death by AI’ is now my principle existential fear just like nukes used to be and that perhaps global warming should be and that the covid pandemic was for a year.
I know, I know – sorting the relative importance of the existential threats to me, my family, our civilization and our species is a weird thing to do, but I can’t be the only one who does this, am I? Do you? Does my Prime Minister?
So for the similarly existentially tortured or needy here is my handy guide to assessing your existential threats:
1. NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST
- Likelihood: 7/10 at the time, though I was 19 and thought Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes was a documentary
- Agency: 1/10. A march to Aldermaston and a badge on my donkey jacket. The Kremlin did not, I regret to report, take note
- Who dies: Everyone. Family, friends, civilisation, species, the lot. Proper Old Testament stuff
- Current status: Filed under “vintage dread.” I occasionally take it out, dust it off, note that the actual bombs are still there and that Putin and Trump have their fingers on the button and that North Korea and maybe soon Iran can launch but perhaps weirdly, I can put it back on the shelf.
2. GLOBAL WARMING
- Likelihood: 9/10, and rising, which is the whole point
- Agency: 3/10 — a bit more than nukes, since I can drive my EV and feel briefly noble about it, before remembering that my annual flights alone put my carbon footprint in the top 1% and that China is still building coal power stations
- Who dies: Mostly people who did the least to cause it, and my children rather more than me. This is the one that quietly reassigned itself from “my problem” to “their inheritance” somewhere around 2005
- Current status: Permanent low hum. The tinnitus of existential threats
3. GLOBAL PANDEMIC
- Likelihood: Turned out to be 10/10, which rather spoils the fun of speculating and did they bury that Wuhan lab under concrete? And of course, threat #3 could be the chosen weapon of threat #4
- Agency: 6/10 — genuinely the best score on the board. Isolate, wear a mask, get the jab, don’t lick the postman. Practical, containable, almost quaint in retrospect
- Who dies: A great many people, though thanks to the agency score, considerably fewer than might have
- Current status: Done. Graded, marked, filed. The only threat on this list with an actual mark and a result
4. DEATH BY AI
- Likelihood: Ask ten experts, get eleven answers, several of them from people currently taking the money to build the thing but 10% is a regularly quoted likelihood they kill us all
- Agency: 0/10, and this is the bit that keeps me on the pavement in South London turning it over. Nukes at least had CND, a march, a badge, a doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction that somebody, somewhere, was rationally managing. AI has no march. There is no Aldermaston for the algorithm
- Who dies: Unclear! Possibly everyone, possibly nobody, possibly just my job, possibly just my sense of what a human being is for. The uncertainty is the novelty
- Current status: Promoted, this week, to Principal Existential Fear, replacing nuclear holocaust in a move that would surprise nineteen-year-old me almost as much as it depresses sixty-four-year-old me
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