IN PERSON EVENT: Creators and Destroyers of Worlds
Details
In this meetup we will explore the idea of an Inescapable Existential Danger: a technology that delivers enormous benefits and carries extinction-level risk in the very same hand. Nuclear weapons were the first of these. They ended a war that had already killed tens of millions, and the terror of mutually assured destruction then underwrote the longest great-power peace in modern history, even as it left us living one accident or miscalculation away from catastrophe. Abolishing them could prove more dangerous than keeping them, since the very threat that restrains the great powers would vanish along with the weapons. Artificial superintelligence is the next and perhaps ultimate version of this bargain: a mind we may not be able to control, yet one that could also cure disease, decode biology, and spare untold suffering, so that refusing to build it would carry its own staggering death toll. In the end, built as we are to choose life, we will reach for these gifts and confront the final reckoning if and when it comes.
Link Ian Nieves, "Creators and Destroyers of Worlds," Quillette (9 May 2026) — https://quillette.com/2026/05/09/creators-and-destroyers-of-worlds-ai-alignment-nuclear-war/
Questions to Think About
- When both building a technology and refusing to build it carry catastrophic risk, how should we decide which danger to accept, and who should hold the authority to decide it for everyone?
- Is it ever justified to accept even a small chance of human extinction in exchange for saving millions of lives in the present, and does weighing the lives of future generations change that answer?
- History shows we rarely give up a powerful technology once we have it. If living with these dangers is permanent, what does it take to manage them wisely over the long run rather than simply hoping our luck holds?