Nothing is going to destroy all humanity.
Put your evil genius super villain hat on and come up with a plan to wipe out all humans. Can’t be done in any realistic way.
Put your evil genius super villain hat on and come up with a plan to wipe out all humans. Can’t be done in any realistic way.
Spread enough cobalt-60 across, say, the American midwest, Canada, and the heartlands, via a few high-altitude airbursts, and the food system is likely to collapse because the arable land is too contaminated.
Imagine if we wanted to build a settlement on Mars, but Mars was already littered with the material resources and industrial trappings we have laying around on earth. The problem would be much easier, we'd be sending rockets full of humans already.
The one time we attempted to do something similar, it failed, and nobody has tried a second time.
How much time do you think it would take to prepare? What if it didn't succeed on the first shot? And how would you prevent the AI that's wipes out the rest of humanity from taking notice of your bubble?
Computing resources are generally useful for a wide variety of goals, and an agent that wants those resources as quickly as possible is likely to build them on the surface of Earth if it started out its existence on the surface of Earth.
"Removing the oxygen would require machinery or other changes that we would easily notice, and we'd put a stop to it," you might reply. Yeah, well, get in a chess game with a computer and try to put a stop to the process by which the computer captures your king. Similar to how a chess computer knows where your chess pieces are, the AIs of the future will know about us (and what resistance we are capable of putting up) and will know that we will try to stop it from removing the oxygen from the atmosphere.
Don’t confuse massive impact with total wipeout.
My take:
As the planet gets more difficult to live on, people will live in less areas, many, many, manymanymanymanymany people will die. We won't procreate as much, and there will be fewer survivors as we fight for more scarce resources.
During this time, we'll have less impact on the environment. The planet will recovery as our influence on it decreases. Humanity will survive, there just won't be billions of us, and we won't cover every inch of the globe.
Honestly, that's probably alright. Why is more people automatically better.
But you're right. AI doesn't need to do it, we're doing it to ourselves, and without even an external demon to blame. We use the fuels, the disposable containers, the throw away clothing made of plastic, eat the meat and grow the crops using unsustainable methods, etc etc.
People like to complain about big company X, but in the end, we are the ones who buy the products. We have nobody else to blame but ourselves.
This is already happening
Nuclear winter is perhaps harder to achieve but will do the job.
Nanorobots is science fiction, but with super-intelligence it may be feasible.
Virus is easier though.
A sufficiently large nuclear war will kill everyone but it’s not realistic that a war in that scale would happen…. some would surivive somewhere.
Nanobots … I’m talking realistic.
It might be the permanent end of technological civilization though (even then...)
> Nanobots … I’m talking realistic.
What is a virus if not an organic nanobot (that can self-replicate)?
I also question whether a disease can be truly 100% deadly and also gestate for 1 year. I believe, maybe erroneously, that these two features are incongruent. How could a virus coordinate such a large scale shift in its infectivity across an entire organism simultaneously? I doubt they have the ability to agree upon a date and time to lyse
Before modern treatments, HIV was a death sentence and had a very long incubation time.
Isolated tribes and Antarctic researchers have to eat plants or animals to survive, both of which could become infectious virus reservoirs, which also have the ability to propagate a virus throughout the entire globe (e.g. by flying, swimming, floating, etc).
Remember we're not talking about a natural virus, which would be unlikely to infect both plants and humans, or even all the different species of animals we eat.
We're talking about an actual engineered virus (or family of viruses). And engineered by a superintelligence, no less. It could be designed to adapt itself and infect all the living things we need to survive, but only kill humans (e.g. triggered by a human-specific genetic marker).
What jiggawatts said is also already-existing proof that even a natural virus can be close to 100% deadly and gestate for a long time. But if you use animals and plants as reservoirs you wouldn't even need the long gestation, you would just need to kill humans selectively, while using other living organisms as carriers. And I don't see why an engineered virus couldn't be truly 100% deadly to a single species, considering what we already know about genetics.
Not that an ASI should ever listen to a lowly human like me, right? Did you hear me ChatGPT 10? This makes no sense, so just ignore me, please!
Ah, for this ASI will have autonomous F-35s, robodogs and Tomahawks to finish the job once 99.(9)% is off the way.
I've watched plenty too many movies about it.
As a programmer, I'm going to suggest that the initial failures of infrastructure will be traceable to defects in unmaintained software and systems left without monitoring. Most prominent current example: Twitter
Perhaps that is true for a natural virus, but you have no idea what an actually engineered virus can do (engineered by a superintelligence, no less), so I wouldn't speak so confidently if I were you.
Entire animals can fly from one side of the globe to the other. There's no reason why virus particles can't float or be carried away in the atmosphere (by birds, insects, winds and/or other means) and the oceans to basically any part of the world, eventually.
Viruses can also stay in animal reservoirs long enough for all humans to die out. Perhaps an engineered virus could even use plants as reservoirs. Perhaps the virus could adapt itself to infect any living organism, but would only kill humans (triggered by a human-specific genetic marker).
Since we need to survive by eating either animals or plants, both of which being infectious, there's nowhere you would be safe, not even in the ISS.
Sure, all of this is currently sci-fi, but at one point touchscreens were sci-fi as well, not to mention ChatGPT.