Justin Smith-Ruiu at The Hinternet:
I happen to think that if there is any threat for which doomerism is a rational response, it is neither climate change nor AI, both of which are almost certainly going to continue to cause us major problems, and worse ones than we’ve known so far, in the coming years. It is, rather, war.
States go to war with one another periodically, and it’s been over eighty years since the last big one. That war arrived at its climax when the Americans introduced the world to a very new and different kind of weapon, in August, 1945. Soon after, a handful of other countries acquired the same destructive technology, and the post-war global order took on the character of a stand-off, fundamentally the same, if at a massively larger scale, as what you find in a hostage crisis. If you are 81 years of age or younger, you have lived your entire life under the reign of an unrelenting terror that we still find so exceptional and unacceptable when it takes the form of a single deranged man strapped with a vest of dynamite, but that somehow just becomes a background feature of everyday reality when that man’s role is assumed by the state.
Over the early post-war period there were several near-misses. Now the post-war period is over, and even the pretense of rational deliberation that that era’s institutions upheld —notwithstanding the absolute barbarian madness of the world those institutions pretended to be leading— has disappeared.
More here.
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