How many people have you talked to face to face about various existential risk scenarios? Have you gotten into probabilities and the logic involved? That’s what I’ve done and this is the level of rigor that is table stakes for calculating the cost-benefit over different possible outcomes.
> How many people have you talked to face to face about various existential risk scenarios
A decent amount.
I started off as a NatSec adjacent staffer and have helped build Cybersecurity and Defense Tech companies, so a lot of my peers and friends are working directly on US-China, US-Russia, Israel-Iran, Saudi-Iran, Saudi-Turkey, India-Pakistan, and India-China relations.
These are all relations that could explode into cataclysmic wars (and have already sparked or exacerbated plenty of wars like the Syrian Civil War, Yemen Civil War, Libyan Civil War, Ethiopian Civil War, Russia-Ukraine War, Myanmar Civil War, Afghan War, etc). We are already going through a global trend of re-armament, with every country expanding their conventional, nuclear, and non-conventional warfighting capabilities. Just about every nuclear state has the nuclear triad or is in the process of implementing a nuclear triad. And China's nuclear rearmament race has forced India to rearm which has forced Pakistan to rearm, and is causing a bunch of regional arms races.
I think the world is more likely to end due to bog standard conflicts escalating into an actual war. Not some sort of AGI/ASI going skynet
Maybe you are right in predicting (guessing?) as to which is more likely. Still, we don’t have the luxury of just rank ordering failure modes and only mitigating the first.
Not to mention that the race for AI technology is likely going to make geopolitics more volatile. If something happens, it doesn’t matter how we bucketed it conceptually. Reality doesn’t care about where we draw the lines.
The false dichotomies abound in many of these discussions.
