So it is with a degree of scepticism that I’ve been following the latest outpouring of warnings about the threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI). In the event, the case mortality rate, though significantly higher than ordinary flu, scarcely seemed to warrant the myriad other harms that lockdown inflicted on the economy and public health. Many of the measures deemed necessary to fight the recent pandemic similarly look like an extreme overreaction. Remember the millennium bug? This admittedly would never have finished off the human race, but an estimated half a trillion dollars in today’s money was spent pre-emptively updating computer systems amid warnings that it would bring the world economy to its knees if nothing was done.Ī far more cost-effective approach would have been simply to deal with failures as they arose, which in the end were minimal in any case. Post Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the nuclear threat has also come racing back.Įven so, mass catastrophe, though much predicted, is in fact a relatively rare occurrence, and despite some near misses, there has been nothing throughout human history even remotely close to an extinction event. More recently, we’ve worried about nuclear annihilation, a meteorite strike such as the one that killed the dinosaurs, Aids, pandemics and, of course, our old friend climate change.Īll of them have been the subject of endless survivalist imaginings, warnings, alarmist forecasts, and dystopian movies.Īnd in virtually all cases, the risks have turned out to be grossly exaggerated, even if the jury is still obviously out on climate change. The Black Death alone is reckoned to have polished off roughly a third of Europe’s population. From warnings of plague, Biblical floods, pestilence, fire and brimstone, human beings have always had a particular propensity for catastrophising, almost regardless of how material the supposed threat really is.Įnd of days was a core belief for many of the millenarian cults that thrived in the Middle Ages – not without cause back then, as it happens.
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