OK, so it's been a year.
But here we are, with some topical blogs that should whet the appetites of anybody with a keen sense of survival.
WHILE MANKIND HAS THE INTELLIGENCE, DOES IT HAVE THE WISDOM?
We need to wake up: mankind is so close to many dangers. Technology is racing ahead in every field, which has driven us into higher living standards, new cures for diseases. But we have the power to destroy ourselves, and we need to realise that this power is so close and so fragile.
The world contains thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert capable of annihilating our species many times over. (We are fortunate that uranium enrichment is so difficult that only nation-states have so far developed this capability).
A couple of generations ago, sophisticated computerisation was reserved for giant machines used by governments. Now it’s embedded in every smartphone. Whereas it took 13 years and billions of dollars to sequence the human genome, today genomes can be sequenced in minutes for less than $500.
Our ingenuity has made us powerful but vulnerable. The development of AI is just merely one item on an ever-growing list of dangers. How long before a solitary fanatic designs and releases a pathogen (like flu virus or H5N1 bird flu) capable of killing millions?
Maybe you believe there are some bright people within governments working diligently on the challenge of existential risk, with forums devoted to the topic, with large budgets for tackling the powder keg we have placed under our future. But you’d be wrong. The policing of synthetic biologic techniques in the UK is overseen by a mere handful of inadequately qualified staff without powers of enforcement and a budget the size of your local McDonald’s.
We live in a state of denial. We are looking the other way. While we have the intellect to reach the thrilling heights of scientific achievement, we have a political culture that thrashes about in the shallows of decadence and superficiality. At a time when we need to step up to face these unprecedented threats, we are bothered by whether the use of the word “curry” amounts to cultural appropriation.
Threatened with these risks, we have developed our own distractions. The culture wars are a form of Freudian displacement. The woke and anti-wokes need each other to engage in their piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically painful to confront.
As thousands of Ottomans massed outside the walls of Constantinople with canon and gunpowder, the Byzantine senators retreated to debate the sex of angels.
Avoidance is increasingly untenable. We cannot go on like this. Life is beautiful and precious, but a brief illumination of existence before we depart into a limitless night.
Should we not be working for a global forum/organisation of sensible ministers to confront these existential risks, to instruct and analyse and allocate serious funding to mitigate them?
We have the intelligence to deal with these dangers - do we have the wisdom?
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