Claire Berlinski at The Cosmopolitan Globalist:
We’re now facing a system of grave, correlated hazards unlike any our species has previously confronted. Great-power rivalry has returned, but it is far more dangerous than the rivalries that led to the First World War, because all of the participants have nuclear weapons, and it is taking place under conditions far less stable than the bipolar competition of the Cold War. We have destroyed the alliance system that prevented nuclear proliferation. Insanely dangerous work at the frontier of biotechnology continues. We learned no lessons from Covid whatsoever. Climate change is wreaking havoc on our habitats, economies, and social trust. The Internet and social media have fractured and atomized our societies, causing a rapid degeneration in human intelligence, leaving us unable to govern ourselves. The unconstrained development of AI is both an existential risk in its own right and an accelerant of a host of other risks, from cyberattacks and bioterrorism to malevolent mass persuasion and autonomous weapons. And precisely when effective international coordination to mitigate these risks is more urgent than it has ever been before, we have an arsonist at the helm of the country that has historically organized that coordination.
I’ve written of all of this before. But recently, on waking up, the thought came to me with uncommon force that all of these risks have become more acute, and the time we have left to mitigate them has contracted sharply. It may already be too late.
Still lying in bed, I thought about this—calmly—for several minutes.
More here.
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