Climate, nuclear and pandemic policy can guide us through the AI threat

The buzz last week over artificial intelligence was the latest revelation that it could place the future of humanity at grave risk. The news invoked nightmarish scenes of AI taking over the world, using agents to carry out its own ends independent of human control like in “The Terminator” and other Hollywood epics.

If AI is potentially existential, then at least three other developments that threaten society loom as examples: climate change, massive pandemics and thermonuclear weapons. Consideration of each may offer insights on AI and how to control, if possible, its hostile potential and harness its value for humanity.

Climate change brought a great ice age. Whether a future ice age or global heating threatens mankind, it has in the past without AI. 

Massive pandemics cannot be dismissed. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that AI could produce a fatal disease that is highly contagious and incurable. Frank Herbert’s “The White Plague,” written in 1982, posited a bioengineered disease that only killed women, suggesting something similar could be manufactured.

Perhaps the most relevant threat comparable to AI was the creation of thermonuclear weapons. It led atomic bomb creator Robert Oppenheimer to quote from Bhagavad Gita — a Hindu scripture featuring a prince at war........

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