The Existential Risks Facing Humanity Today
If you ask the average person what they think the greatest risk facing humanity today is, you’d probably get some repetition of climate change, environmental degradation, or resource depletion.
While the life-cycle of the planet — with or without human contribution — has an expiry date (think the heat death of the planet in about a billion years), for all the climate-panic, these concerns don’t do much to move the existential needle. Instead, what is propelling the clock of humanity towards existential midnight is the twin concerns of nuclear annihilation and AI biotech.
While humanity as a species might survive a global nuclear war in some isolated areas, the world would be reset back to before the dark ages. The loss of technology, supply chain, and manufacturing capacity would make the remaining humans much more vulnerable to a lack of resources (food and clean water), disease, and climate disasters. And nuclear war is a very real possibility.
Then we have the threats from biotechnology and AI that present in an altogether different manner. There are of course the risks of genetic manipulation that could bring with it severe unintended consequences leading to genetic or ecosystem collapse. But the more direct existential threat is that we are on the cusp of being able to alter what it means to be human. Imagine a country such as China lobotomizing, among a swath of the population, a part of the human brain responsible for heterodox thinking, for spiritual longing, or for political rebellion, making a kind of subservient, hive-mind race. (This could be done either through gene editing in embryo or with chip implants). Such direct manipulation of the human organism might not even be the most pressing threat coming from this technology. Philosophers have long been warning of a hyperreal dystopia (achieved even without gene editing or merging man with machine) where humanity becomes irretrievably lost to itself in a virtual haze of simulation and simulacra. We can already see the embryo of this hyper-reality in the growing hypnotic and dissociative power of social media. (And there are of course many other unforeseen risks of technology, from a new kind of 3D printable nuclear weapon to being able to alter the fabric of spacetime, but these are much more speculative).
On one hand we have nuclear annihilation in WW3 or at the very least a great reset back to the dark ages; on the other hand we have transhumanism that threatens to erase what it means to be human, launching us into a technological singularity of synthetic consciousness (or the complete erasure of consciousness), or at the very least where man becomes indistinguishable from machine.
This is one of the reasons thinkers such as myself push back so strongly against woke ideology, particularly in regards to sex and gender. Gender ideologues are so willing to obfuscate reality in the effort to make male and female interchangeable; transhumanists, who do not even understand what it means to be human, have the same vision for the interchangeability of humanity and machine. Female erasure has the same indications for human erasure.
We must walk a very fine line. Technology and human knowledge, for all its promise, confronts us also with the threat of our annihilation. It is the narrow road that leads to salvation. What nightmares might we unleash if our technology continues to outstrip our humanity. Our technologies and extensions of man mimic something inside us, they reflect us to ourselves. The world has always in a sense been virtual (the world we inhabit is a representation our mind creates out of information from our senses), but now we have entered the age of the virtual construction of reality, an age that threatens either to trap us in an inescapable maze, or where we will recognize our true selves in the simulated reflection and awaken from our long slumber to find our place as co-creators of reality. Do not be persuaded to give up our humanity before we even had a chance to become real.
