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  • Oxford University.

  • July 2008.

  • A panel of experts from the Future of Humanity Institute published the results of a survey regarding the global catastrophic risks that humanity will face in the 21st century.

  • The results of the question arable, surprising and concerning because the experts agree that there is a one in five chance of human extinction before the year 2100 At the 2008 Oxford Conference, participants considered nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and war to be the three categories that were most likely to bring about such an event.

  • Personally, the one that keeps me awake at night is tthe e unbridled development of artificial intelligence.

  • It's partially because of the weaponization of artificial intelligence.

  • What I like to refer to is the dark triad of offensive, lethal autonomous machines.

  • The possibility of programming errors or of users deliberately inflicting these on Hannity populations is the type of thing that makes me nervous.

  • Development of artificial intelligence is supposed to make lives a lot easier, but in practice might represent the biggest existential threat of all.

  • When we see a civilization that effectively disappears without a record of precisely why they left the answer is often rooted in the development of advanced technology because advanced technology enables a larger population to live in a smaller area.

  • But if something happens to the resource is themselves, then you don't have the capacity to support a population anymore.

  • When I look at an episode like Rome making an incredible drainage system out of lead pipes and then everyone goes nuts, is it all that different than human society building the technology to the point where we forget that we're really just part of an ecosystem that's much more powerful than us?

  • No matter what we build, we have a tendency to assume that we can always innovate our way out of the crisis of the moment.

  • There's also no guarantee that technology will save a civilisation when it's faced with the next distension threat.

  • Well, we live to see the day when our own civilization comes to an end.

  • Given how advance we've become, it seems unlikely that all of our current technology, our city's architecture culture, could ever be reduced to a giant pile of rocks and a few carvings.

  • With that again, maybe it's our naive belief that it can't happen to us.

  • That makes our demise inevitable.

  • So is there any way we can prevent it?

  • Perhaps the answer will be one more.

  • That, for now, remains unexplained.

Oxford University.

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