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by nytesky 549 days ago
Grey goo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo

AI paperclips

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem

Prions getting into food supply

Nuclear holocaust.

I’m definitely not sleeping tonight. I can see why Gen Z is thinking not to have kids…

2 comments

I find it slightly heartening to consider that all biological life is already a long-running Gray Goo apocalypse, and one of the inheritors of that legacy are towering trillion-unit megastructures with eldritch hiveminds were call "people."
Environmental collapse due to climate change is way, way more likely than any of those.
And a full environmental collapse is not even strictly necessary to end civilization. If the climate perturbation is large enough it will cause a mass migration and an economic disaster, either of which is enough to cause a war.

Can humanity peacefully deal with things like half of China becoming uninhabitable by humans? Dunno but if I had to pit humanity against this or the mirror bacteria I'd choose the latter.

And Nuclear incidents caused by climate/ai extremists are way more likely than those.

Environmental collapse is a convenient, very portable goalpost though.

Lol, no activist is going to cause a nuclear event. It's just easier to accept that than the fact that we're ruining the biosphere.