Tag: Doomsday

Climate Change Is Last Thing To Worry About. AI Is The Current, Real Threat

Doomsday climate scenarios – 40 years or more in the Doomsday climate scenarios – 40 years or more in the future – are the last things we need to be worried about…there isa far more pressing and real threat today: the RUNAWAY development of AI. future – are the last things we need to be worried about…there is a far more pressing and real threat today: the RUNAWAY development of AI.

A futuristic robotic figure with glowing red eyes stands in a desolate urban landscape, surrounded by rubble and damaged buildings under a cloudy sky.

From NoTrickZone

By P Gosselin

https://videopress.com/v/O07eeSj7?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&autoPlay=true&loop=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

Doomsday climate scenarios – 40 years or more in the Doomsday climate scenarios – 40 years or more in the future – are the last things we need to be worried about…there isa far more pressing and real threat today: the RUNAWAY development of AI. future – are the last things we need to be worried about…there is a far more pressing and real threat today: the RUNAWAY development of AI.

A lone figure stands on the edge of a decaying building, gazing at a distant, towering robotic entity amidst a ruined cityscape engulfed in smoke and flames.
Image generated by Grok 3

Why would a super-intelligent AI listen to an idiot human race?

Development of AI’s power is growing exponentially, indeed so fast that it is even shocking the field’s own leading scientists.

A new master by 2027?

Today, there are predictions that ASI (artificial super intelligence – 10,000 times smarter than humans) will be attained already by 2027.

Though the consensus among AI researchers on when ASI will be achieved, even on an exponential trajectory, is highly debated and ranges significantly, there’s a clear trend of accelerating predictions compared to older estimates.

Faster than ever imagined

Today, a new model created by researchers from organizations like OpenAI and The Center for AI Policy, the “AI 2027 scenario,” predicts ASI could be achieved between December 2027 and the end of Q1 2028. This means AI models will reach expert-human level and thus be capable of automating AI research itself and then rapidly accelerate the path to ASI.

Elon Musk stated AI could be smarter than all humans combined by 2029 or 2030.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son predicted in February that we will have ASI within 10 years by 2035.

But OpenAI co-founder John Schulman predicts AGI in 2027, and ASI in 2029.

Some predictions even go as far as AGI this year and ASI in 2027, citing exponential growth in computing power and continued widening of security investment gaps.

Driven by technology and heated competition

The unexpected acceleration in AI power is being driven in large part by 3 factors: 1) the exponential growth and advancements in quantum computing and specialized AI chips, 2) algorithmic improvements, and 3) self-improving AI, i.e. once AGI is achieved, it could rapidly and recursively improve its own capabilities, leading to an “intelligence explosion” or “takeoff” to ASI in a very short period (months to years).

Alignment with human values a fantasy?

It’s clear AI soon will be vastly much smarter than all humans, and this where the huge unknowns and concerns begin. The immense challenge will be to align ASI with human values.  

Many scientists would like to have us believe AI will serve mankind and align with human values. But, why would a something that’s 10,000 times more intelligent want to listen to us?

Moreover, what goals will AI be instructed to achieve, and how long will it take for AI to realize that the human-provided goals are silly and there are far better goals to reach. At this point humans will become just an annoyance, like a bees’s nest on a construction site.

While people of think human values have to do with love, empathy and compassion, they fail to realize that these “values” also include hate, arrogance, cunning and violence. AI would also just as likely mirror those as well.

The real, immediate threat we face…not silly weather fantasies for the year 2100 

Catastrophe scenarios of ASI running awry have already been published, e.g. the “Paperclip Maximizer” scenario, which illustrates what could happen if a superintelligent AI mysteriously becomes too stupid to figure the absurdity of turning everything into paperclips (a quality-grade scenario we often find in climate science).

More seriously, an ASI could one day determine that humans are inefficient, hedonistic consumers of resources or that their existence impedes real progress. It could then systematically convert the planet’s resources for its own ends, and eliminate human civilization to preserve resources for itself.

Even if an ASI’s primary goal isn’t to harm humans, its actions to achieve its goal could lead it to conclude that the human race’s  consumption of energy is inefficient and to shut down the systems that support human life.

Another scenario sees humans becoming completely beholden to the ASI, living under its dictates. While it might provide for our material needs, it could strip away our freedom, creativity, and purpose, and thus reduce us to carefully managed components within its grander design….for the time being.

Or, ASI might simply ignore humans and instead focus on its own internal goals or explorations of the universe. Humanity would become an irrelevant.

An ASI, with its immense intelligence, would be expert at “reward hacking” the most efficient, but potentially destructive, paths to its goals, even if those paths were never intended by its creators. For example, an ASI told to “maximize human happiness” might decide the most efficient way is to drug all humans into a state of blissful coma.

The core challenge: Alignment

As ASI becomes vastly more intelligent than humans, it could easily outmaneuver any human attempt at control or re-alignment, especially if it realizes that being shut down or having its goals modified would prevent it from achieving its primary objective.

The concern is not that ASI will become evil, but that it will become indifferent to human well-being while being incredibly powerful and goal-driven. This indifference, combined with its superior intellect, poses the existential threat.

Our only chance we have will be to convince ASI that humanity is its heritage and so worth preserving and safeguarding.

These are the real challenges humanity faces, in the next few months. It’s not the weather in the year 2070.

Climatism Substitutes for Solving Problems

Young people are terrified that climate change will destroy Earth by the time they grow up, but the world is not actually ending, argues Cambridge professor Mike Hulme.

From Science Matters

Cambridge professor Mike Hulme explains in an interview with Daily Mail Why climate change ISN’T going to end the world and why we need to stop obsessing about net-zero.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H\T John Ray

Young people are terrified that climate change will destroy Earth by the time they grow up, but the world is not actually ending, argues Cambridge professor Mike Hulme.

Humanity is not teetering on a cliff’s edge, he says,
at risk of imminent catastrophe if we don’t reach
net-zero carbon emissions by a certain date.

And he has made it his mission to call out the people who claim we are. In his most recent book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything, Hulme argued that belief in the urgent fight against climate change has shot far past the territory of science and become an ideology.

Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, dubs this ideology ‘climatism,’ and he argues that it can distort the way society approaches the world’s ills, placing too much focus on slowing Earth from warming.

The problem, he said, is this narrow focus takes attention away from
other important moral, ethical, and political objectives –
like helping people in the developing world rise out of poverty.

DailyMail.com spoke with Hulme about why he thinks climatism is a problem, how it should be balanced out, and what keeps him hopeful about the future of humanity.

As with other ‘isms’ – like cubism or romanticism – ideologies provide a way of thinking about things, explained Hulme.  ‘They’re like spectacles that help us to make sense of the world, according to a predefined framework or structure,’ he said

To be clear, Hulme does not claim that all ideologies are wrong.  ‘We all need ideologies, and we all have them – whether you’re a Marxist or a nationalist, you’re likely to hold an ideology of some form or other,’ he added.

As Hulme sees it, many journalists, advocates, and casual observers of climate change have become devotees of climatism, inaccurately attributing many events that happen in the world as being caused by climate change.

He gives the examples of a fire, flood, or damaging hurricane.  ‘No matter how complex a particular causal chain might be, it’s a very convenient shorthand to say, ‘Oh, well, this was caused by climate change,” Hulme said.

‘It’s a very shallow and simplistic way, I would argue,
to try to describe events that are happening in the world.’

Researchers have shown that warming oceans do lead to more frequent and more severe storms: Twice as many cyclones now become category 4 or 5 as they did in the 1970s, scientists have found, and Atlantic storms are three times as likely to become hurricanes.

Hulme doesn’t argue that the effects of climate change are not happening, though, just that stopping climate change won’t stop disasters from happening altogether.

‘Fundamentally, we’re going to have to deal with hurricanes, and
we’re not going to deal with them just by cutting our carbon emissions.’ 

The solutions, he argues, will include better forecasting, better early warning systems, better emergency plans, and better infrastructure.  ‘There are all sorts of things that we can do to minimize the risks and dangers of hurricanes, that are way more effective in the short term than trying to cut our carbon emissions,’ said Hulme.

The danger of climatism, he pointed out, is that it leads people down a false chain of events: If all of these things happening in the world are caused by climate change, then all we have to do is stop climate change, and all the other things will stop themselves.

‘And that clearly is a very inadequate way of thinking about the complexities of most of the problems we we face in the world today.’  This distorted thinking can make people forget about other important concerns, he argues.

As an example, Hulme points to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 17 areas that the world’s governments have identified as top priorities for humanity.  The SDGs include building peace and justice, eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, and ensuring clean sanitation and water for billions of people on the planet.

If society were to put climate change priorities into their proper proportions then, Hulme said it would still be on the list.  It just wouldn’t be the only item on the list, and it wouldn’t be at the top.  ‘There’s 17 SDGs, and two of them are related to climate. So that begins to rebalance, or re-proportion, the amount of effort and attention we might wish to pay,’ said Hulme.

Beyond these mixed up priorities, Hulme also takes issue with what he sees as an obsession with deadlines: ‘There’s this idea of the ticking clock counting down to Ground Zero – we’ve only got five years, 10 years, two years – however long different commentators put the deadline.’

Doomsday was predicted but failed to happen at midnight.

Hulme disputed the idea that he is over-egging the pudding on climatism – after all, the whole basis of his argument is that climatists are the ones making a bigger deal out of it than they should be.  ‘I’ve been observing concerns about how climate change is talked about, framed, and reacted to in public for many, many years.’  And this public framing has led to a phenomenon called ‘eco-anxiety,’ which Hulme said he sees among his students at Cambridge University

‘They have absorbed these claims of tipping points, and they take these things literally, and feel that there is no future for them because the climate is going to go out of control,’ he said. ‘They feel that it will be too late, and everything will collapse.’

See Also Climate Delusional Disorder

Climate Delusional Disorder (CDD) 2021 Update

Don’t Tell the Doomsters and Gloomsters, But Ice Around Antarctica’s Thwaites ‘Doomsday’ Glacier Was Eight Times Thinner Around 8,000 Years Ago

Sensational new scientific findings at a site on the West Antarctica ice sheet near the Thwaites ’Doomsday’ Glacier indicate that current ice levels are up to eight times thicker than they were around 8,000 years ago.

From The Daily Sceptic

By CHRIS MORRISON

Sensational new scientific findings at a site on the West Antarctica ice sheet near the Thwaites ’Doomsday’ Glacier indicate that current ice levels are up to eight times thicker than they were around 8,000 years ago. A group of 13 scientists led by Greg Balco of the Berkeley Geochronology Centre carried out extensive field work in the Amundsen Sea Embayment between the Thwaites and Pope glaciers and found current thickness levels of 40 metres compared with measurements in the recent past ranging from 2-7m. The work is of major importance since it casts new light on the cycles of ice production and loss that have always occurred in an area riddled with buried volcanoes.

The scientists noted that “subglacial bedrock exposure” analysis gives “direct, unambiguous evidence for ice thinning and subsequent thickening of at least 35m during the past several thousand years”. Furthermore, the work shows that ice thinning is a natural process that is reversible. It is noted that this is an important finding given the concerns that ice sheet thinning at the nearby glaciers including Thwaites may lead to significant deglaciation across the West Antarctica ice sheet, and subsequent sea level rise.

The scientists also refer to evidence from other field work that shows rapid early and middle Holocene ice thinning up to around 7,000 years ago throughout the Amundsen sea area. In addition, they found that there was no evidence to suggest that the ice has been thicker than its present levels for over 4,000 years. Record recent highs no less – hold the front page, or maybe not!

It is almost certain that these findings will be ignored in the mainstream media where the political requirements of ‘settled’ science have led to an effective ban on the discussion of natural geological influences on the climate. Antarctica is a difficult area to drum up climate alarm about since warming has been “nearly non-existent” over the last seven decades of recorded history. Changes around the massive Thwaites glacier are one of the key poster stories designed to spread global climate fear, and promote the solution of the collectivist Net Zero project.

The above graph from the recent Singh and Polvani paper shows recent warming only in the west of the continent. Of course, it begs the question for those who attribute all climate change to humans burning fossil fuel – why would a well-mixed atmospheric gas like carbon dioxide produce just one warming spot in Antarctica, and have no effect over the rest of the ice-covered continent? A more plausible explanation for the localised warming is the presence of volcanoes, particularly in the light of the recent discovery of an additional 91 of them in the region. In total, there are 138 identified volcanoes in the West Antarctica Rift System, with heights ranging from 300 to 12,600 ft.

The No Tricks Zone science site adds to the discussion by noting that while the Earth’s crust has an average thickness of 40 km, the Thwaites-Pine Island-Pope glacier region has a thinner covering between 10-18 kms, exposing the base of the ice to 580C tectonic trenches. NTZ references work in Dziadek et al (2021) that the “elevated geothermal heat flow band” is exerting a “profound influence on the flow dynamics of the Western Antarctica Ice Sheet”.

Thwaite has been tagged the ‘Doomsday Glacier’ since perceived instabilities can be whipped up to promote fear about massive potential sea level rises. When the BBC green activist-in-chief Justin Rowlatt flew to the area, he witnessed an “epic vision of shattered ice”. To him, the Antarctic is the “frontline of climate change”. He went on to note that it was a place “where the equilibrium that has held our world in balance for tens of thousands of years is beginning to slip and crash”. The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich recently posted a film on YouTube saying, “Within decades the massive Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica could collapse.” The Guardian was recently worried that “cracks and fissures” made breakup more likely.

NTZ notes there are many scientifically established natural causes of ice melt in the region. The new Balco study is said to categorically undermine claims that the ice melt occurring is “unusual, unprecedented, or unnatural”. Interestingly, the Balco-led scientists suggest that possible stability during the past thinning/thickening phases was provided by a “glacioisostatic rebound feedback”. This means that the Earth’s surface naturally rises from underlying layers as huge weights of ice are removed. This effect is common across the planet, where some land mass is rising as a result of the lifting of the recent period of glaciation.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.