FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
If we think about the end of the Planet, barring an improbable explosion of the Sun, it will be able to go easily even without us
Part 2
Last March, under the auspices of the Future of Humanity Institute, a research center in Oxford whose name already says a lot about the emotional temperature of the topic we are dealing with, a surprising study was published. Where 160 experts in various sectors and superforecasters, i.e. people who, despite not having a specialization, have turned out to be extremely skilled in forecasting competitions, drew up a ranking of risks.
Distinguishing between catastrophic events, such as the extinction of up to 10 percent of the population (World War II, as it were, wiped out 3 percent) and events that could cause extinction, saving only a core of “maximum 5000 lucky, or unlucky souls", as the Economist wrote. In first place overall is Artificial Intelligence (AI), to which superforecasters assign a catastrophe risk (by 2100) of 2.1 percent compared to 12 percent by experts and an extinction risk of 0.38 and 3 percent respectively. In a video conference from Oregon, Josh Rosenberg, the study's coordinator, explained that the goal was to photograph the state of the debate to see how it would change over time. While he doesn't want to comment on the merits, he simply points out that he wouldn't consider a 0.3 percent chance of extinction completely negligible.
However, in the short term he is more concerned about nuclear power and pandemics than AI. As Douglas Rushkoff, author of the fascinating investigation Only the Rich (Louis University Press), reframes the topic, starting again with the bunkers and private islands they hijack: «AI will do what it's programmed to do. And if it extracts value from people's lives, it is the fault of capitalism, which demands it from it, not the algorithm that executes it." To give us one last sentence about the alarm raised by the founders: «The technological fraternity is very afraid of it, because they were sure that they could dominate the masses, since they were more intelligent. And if AI gets past them, it risks doing to them what they did to us."
A similar institution to the one run at Oxford by transhumanist Nick Bostrom is the Center for Existential Risks in Cambridge. It was founded eleven years ago by astronomer Martin Rees, author of the book "If Science is to Save Us". With a clear purpose: to focus on "black swans", highly unlikely events, but with cataclysmic consequences.
“The opposite of car accidents, very likely and very studied. That is why we were born, aware that even if we could reduce these risks by one-thousandth, we would have largely justified our existence.”
Among the big targets of their latest studies are "cyber attacks that can bring a country to its knees in days and biological warfare, with weapons that have never been so affordable." Plus, of course, AI for which he says a reasonable measure would be to provide "an interim period, between development and market release, as is done with drugs."
Three years earlier he had made a bet with Steven Pinker, the Harvard neuroscientist famous for perma-optimism, that a sudden biological event could kill over a million people. Then came Covid, with nearly 10 million deaths, but no one paid off the bet because they couldn't agree on the definition of a biological event.
We arrived at the Coronavirus. For something like this you had to go back a century (1918-1920), to the Spanish flu and its 50-100 million victims. Among the few who saw it coming this time was David Quammen, who, eight years ago, in the prophetic book "Spillover" warned against the dangers of virus strains.
From his studio in Montana, where he holds a python as if it were a cat, he begins by making a distinction: "If we think about the end of the planet, barring an improbable explosion of the Sun, it will be able to walk easily even without us. If we then talk about humanity, with its 8 billion inhabitants and the great genetic diversity, it will be difficult to eliminate us all". Difficult, but not impossible, and you can almost hear him doing the mental calculations of Armageddon: “A nuclear war could be right around the corner. Even an RNA virus, such as the bird flu that infected humans, would probably kill half of them. But only endangered species would disappear, those in which there are few specimens left."
The real highlanders would be the cockroaches mentioned at the beginning, some mice and, on the plant side, dandelions. That said, however, we've learned so little from the lessons of the pandemic that "we're probably worse off than we were in 2019, after the National Institutes of Health, the most important federal health agency, changed the rules making it extremely difficult for scientists of different nationalities, cooperating with each other. Vaccines were developed in record time thanks to the genome sequenced by the Chinese. Same with Moderna's first results. Or for the development of antivirals. Today it would no longer be possible".
The virus of sovereignty does not spare science. In the wake of the lab leak hypothesis, the US Congress also canceled several million dollars in funding for riskier research, the so-called "gain of function": "Ignorance is an ugly beast."
We ask similar questions to Richard Hatchett, director of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a public-private foundation whose social purpose is to be ready for the next pandemic: “Are we better off? It depends. Even if it seems absurd, we were very lucky that in 2020 there was a Coronavirus, a family we knew and on which we had already started studying vaccines. If the virus was from a different family, the reaction could be slower. But we've also learned a lot, from quick response platforms to better testing and tracking, or how to react while avoiding bottlenecks.”
Among the threats that take away sleep, paramyxoviruses stand out, such as Nipah and Hendra, not as transmissible as Covid, but with a mortality rate that has reached 70-80 percent. Countermeasures? "To drastically shorten the production time of vaccines. The lesson comes from Formula 1 where short pit stop breaks went from 60-90 to 2-3 seconds. If three years ago it seemed like a miracle that it took 11 months for the vaccine, next time 100 days will be enough. It can be done by investing the necessary resources". (world.al)
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