90 seconds to midnight

It is only the vanity of mankind that we consider ourselves smart enough to be able to forecast our demise. There is no scarcity of doomsday predictors in the market right now, it can come in a variety of shapes and forms like Global Warming, Super Intelligent AGI, Alien invasion or a nuclear holocaust. Despite the alarms bells going off at multiple places using the metrics we have created, there does not seem to be any consensus on finding a solution. Lets take a deeper look at each of the threats.

The most likely scenario in which humanity comes to an end is self destruction using nuclear weapons. The doomsday clock was reset to 90 secs till midnight back in Jan, 2023 when Russia invaded Ukraine under the threat of NATO expansion. It has not been touched again since then even though there were multiple events which brought us near the doorsteps of WW3. The middle east crisis ultimately led to Iran sending a strong response against Israel; any significant retaliation from Israel could have led us down the path of an escalation ladder but it was thankfully avoided. The US-China situation remains tense with Taiwan and South China Sea conflict and its only the distraction in the middle east and Ukraine which has kept it on hold . The neo-conservatives in US have done a great job in bringing Russia-China-Iran nexus together which makes it a much more level playing field. It is to be noted here that the general public are now much more aware of these topics and its possible ramifications; one can argue that this was one of the major factors which played a role in the defeat of Democrats in US elections. Donald Trump fought on the promise of ending Russia Ukraine war within 24 hours of his election, however, his rhetoric seems to be changed after winning, in fact he seems to be advancing towards an American imperialism policy by going after Panama Canal, Greenland and even Canada (maybe in jest) . Donald Trump being himself can afford the luxury of making some of these comments and not invite an immediate reaction but things can change pretty fast if some of these words start translating into action. USA is not the same super power it was 50 years ago because of the nature of multi polar world we are living, they cannot still afford to go after poor countries in South Asia, Middle east and Africa let alone some strategically important geography where Russia and China have been making advances since the last couple of decades. Considering everything, it seems like that there are lot of things which have to fall in place for a nuclear war to happen, but as some prominent authors and economists have predicted, if it happens it can all come down in a matter of hours.

Moving on to things we cannot control that easily, but still control is the effect of climate change. This Friday, NASA released its annual report confirming that 2024 was the hottest year in history and it comes right after the last hottest year in history, 2023, which indicates the trend is clear. What is more troubling, however, is that this was the first year which breached the 1.5 degree Celsius warming mark, which means that the temperate in 2024 was 1.55 degrees higher than the preindustrial times (1850-1900). This phenomenon does seem more personal as i felt the brunt of it this year going to Delhi for 2 weeks in the middle of June and finding the weather unbearable. Lot of people would say that climate change is a hoax and earth is resilient enough to handle such fluctuations, this becomes a political topic when making certain sacrifices in the name of saving environment comes at an economic cost. This kind of dichotomy on something that is factual creates a very big problem because at some level we are not even addressing that this is a problem. In fact going back to the the previous example of nuclear threat, the reason there is an increased interest in Greenland now is the melting of Arctic caps has opened up a new trade route and opportunity to extract rare earth metals, hence there is no surprise that every super power wants to control that. Unlike Nuclear holocaust, the end because of global warming will not be abrupt but occur through more isolated events like the recent LA palisades wildfires which can make it more difficult for everyone to address the problem and find a solution.

Finally, coming to the least likely way of humanity collapsing is the appearance of a more intelligent species, ASI or Artificial Super Intelligence. Long being the folklore of science fiction movies, ASI seems to be more closer than ever before. For very long, the benchmark of intelligence was just a Turing test, it is safe to say that we crossed that milestone with the launch of GPT 3.5 even though some people might argue otherwise. However, with more advanced models being released since then, it is safe to say that we are beyond that but the interesting thing is that no one talks about it anymore, the goal post has shifted. The recent O3 model by Open AI has performed exceptionally well on multiple intelligence tests and again no one seems to worried about that very much. The narrative is that these technologies are always going to help us ( maybe not all of us equally), it will make life easier and we will be in the age of abundance. While that maybe true, it is definitely something that not everyone agrees on , specially the people that matter. Jeff Bezos, in an interview with Lex Friedman, has said that we don't understand these alien technologies very well; Elon Musk has always made calls for regulations and considers AGI a very big threat to humanity and most importantly Geoff Hinton, the pioneer of neural nets, has been very vocal on the dangers emanating from these AI systems but found himself winning a Nobel Prize for Physics this year. The point is that unlike the other two threats, there is still no consensus on whether AGI will ever be a threat to humanity, the eternal hope being that human prosperity is the maximizing function in this equation. The key thing to consider here is what if the machines become sentient and the equation changes.

Despite all the gloom and doom, life goes an as usual. America is celebrating making itself great again, there is no heatwave because it is still January and I am relieved as long as my phone does not tell me how I will die.