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Peter Watts's avatar

Dude, you make Schopenhauer look like Pollyanna. Given that half the world is on fire and the rest is underwater, I’m kinda surprised by your reliance on linear tech projections. Even a car two meters from a cliff’s edge could have been following a linear trajectory for miles. Don’t know how far into the future I’d feel comfortable extending that line.

Here are a few additional projections that might be worth considering. By 2050, the world’s arable land will be exhausted (we thought we had until 2070, but like most of our worst-case scenarios, that turned out to be delusionally optimistic). Malaria will be resident in the Baltic. People will remember Covid as the Good Old Days, back when there were these things called “coral reefs”; Nipah, after spending a few decades on local tour around Bangladesh and Indonesia, will finally hitch a ride to the EU and start racking up higher kill rates than smallpox. This will actually be just as well, since a new strain of wheat rust, immune to all known fungicides (and currently spreading quietly through the Middle East) will have decimated the planet’s grain supply so there won’t be a lot of food to go around anyway. Nipah will be but one act in an ongoing festival-o’germs; it’s estimated that we haven’t even identified 99% of the zoonotic diseases out there, much less developed countermeasures.

Iceland will fail to scale up their carbon-sequestration technology by the the 624 million times necessary to even balance out daily global emissions at 2017 levels, never mind making a dent in the backlog we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Species will continue going extinct at a rate of 130,000 per year, and climbing. The Powers That Be will continue to not do anything significant to rein in emissions (the “economic recovery” we’re all celebrating post-covid is being powered mainly by coal, and has already more than wiped out the modest dip we managed when the planet slowed down last year), but there’s not much they could do anyway since even cutting our emissions to zero tomorrow would still result in a 3-5C temperature rise in the Arctic by century’s end, thanks to methane tipping points.

Granted, that’s looking ahead past 2050. But I’d argue that even 2050 is probably too farsighted, given that business-as-usual models suggest global societal collapse ten years earlier than that. That’s roughly the point at which our population peaks, after which it will crater by 40-50% over the following seventy years or so. And keep in mind that grim as this may seem, so far the observed reality has consistently proven worse than the worst-case scenarios we tried to predict them with. Sea level rise, ice-cap shrinkage, firestorm frequency and intensity have all been far worse than expected. (That “heat dome” that caused Lytton to burn to the ground a few weeks back? None of the models saw that coming.)

I see I haven’t made any prognostications about cool stuff like AI and neuroengineering, so I’ll finish off with one. The Zero-pointers will have safely buggered off to their fortresses in New Zealand or their recommissioned missile silos in the Colorado Rockies or their luxury Apocalypse Submarines, there to wait out the collapse in international waters. The rest of us, driven by desperation and a thirst for vengeance, may try to storm those battlements and get a bit of payback before we sink into the quagmire—but thanks to advances in AI, the weaponized drones deployed by the Muskovites and the Zuckerborg will be more than capable of mowing us down, without even requiring any flesh-and-blood minions to operate them from within the barricades.

Killer robots. That’s pretty cool, at least.

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Carl Schwab's avatar

I believe you are mischaracterizing Robin Hanson. He states in his conclusion that the world described in the book has less than a 0.1% chance of coming true. It's more of a thought experiment than a prediction.

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