Surely not … Does Greg Egan understand how “a small chance every year” can build into “almost certain by this date”? Because that was convincing for me:
I can easily see humans building work-arounds or stop-gaps for most major problems, and continuing business mostly as usual. We run out of fossil fuels, so we get over our distrust of nuclear energy because it’s the only way. We don’t slow environmental damage enough, so agriculture suffers, so we get over our distrust of genetically modified plants because it’s the only way. And so on.
Then some article somewhere reminded me that business as usual includes repeated attempts at artificial intelligence. And runaway AI is not something we can build a work-around for; given a long enough timespan and faith in human ingenuity, we’ll push through all the other non-instant-game-over events until we finally succeed at making the game end instantly.
Surely not … Does Greg Egan understand how “a small chance every year” can build into “almost certain by this date”? Because that was convincing for me:
I can easily see humans building work-arounds or stop-gaps for most major problems, and continuing business mostly as usual. We run out of fossil fuels, so we get over our distrust of nuclear energy because it’s the only way. We don’t slow environmental damage enough, so agriculture suffers, so we get over our distrust of genetically modified plants because it’s the only way. And so on.
Then some article somewhere reminded me that business as usual includes repeated attempts at artificial intelligence. And runaway AI is not something we can build a work-around for; given a long enough timespan and faith in human ingenuity, we’ll push through all the other non-instant-game-over events until we finally succeed at making the game end instantly.
If independent.