Vox Populi:

If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable. — Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Port Huron Statement, June 15, 1962

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Doomsday Dimensions: The Chimney, the Cloud, and the Computer

On January 27, the famed ‘Doomsday Clock’ of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, set symbolically ticking in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight, was moved closer than ever – 85 seconds – to the apocalyptic point of no return to life on Earth. For sixty years, that apocalypse was anticipated to take the mushrooming form of what President John F. Kennedy, shuddering from the close call of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, called “the final failure” of nuclear war. In 2007, the prospect of biosphere collapse from global warming – the opposite apocalypse to nuclear winter – was identified as a co-equal danger, to be joined in 2016 by existential threats of what the Bulletin called “mass disruption” from emerging technologies, some of them (e.g., AI) by then already compounding nuclear dangers and accelerating global warming.

“It is clear,” the Bulletin’s Scientific Advisory Board wrote ten years ago, introducing this latest dimension of doom, that “advances in biotechnology; in artificial intelligence, particularly for use in robotic weapons; and in the cyber realm all have the potential to create global-scale risk.” In the violently volatile time since – featuring the puncture wounds of the pandemic, Russia’s war of disastrous choice in Ukraine, and the corrupt climate denialism of the Trump Administrations – these three dimensions have become fused in evermore tightly-knit ways. The day of increasingly or fully Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) has dawned, casting a hideous artificial light on conventional conflict while increasing the odds that high-tech war between major powers – under algorithmic direction, command, and ‘control’ – will ‘go nuclear’. Just as nuclear war and global warming are two versions of the same threat, irreversible climate breakdown, so that dual-menace is magnified by the cruel capacities and unnatural appetites of the Technosphere, a ‘sphere’ of seemingly far greater ‘influence’ than the biosphere it is helping to ruin.  

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