Yesterday, I posted on  CAN YOU CHAT WITH AN AI GOD ?       That seems somewhat frivolous in the world of Artificial Intelligence when there are more serious existential threats. Ongoing is a race for  Artificial General Intelligence  ( AGI ) that is beginning to impact on the geopolitical world as  First Strike  and the resultant  Nuclear Winter  did during the late Cold War in the mid-1980s. It is debatable whether AGI has attained an operable state, but countries and companies are taking this quite seriously, as a prelude to ASI, or Artificial Super Intelligence, when machines surpass human capabilities on cognitive tasks, when we are outperformed across every domain by a wide margin. When?   The timing of AGI ranges from very soon to the late 2020s to mid century to never. The uncomfortable fear is that AGI represents an existential risk. AI has already surpassed humans on a variety of language, understanding and visual ben...

Would you believe it was 1863 when 27-year old novelist  Samuel Butler,  in an essay on Darwin Among the Machines, expressed serious concern that highly advanced machines might pose existential risks to humanity? The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question . In 1920, a play,  R.U.R . ( Rossum's Universal Robots ), by Czech author Karel Čapek, coined the term  robot .  They began to replace human workers, leading to a violent revolt against their  Homo sapien  masters.  Fritz Lang's 1927 film,  Metropolis , had humanoid robots fighting the capitalist oligarchy.  Click on that link to watch the entire 2 hour 29 minute production.  Fine quality, silent, of course, but with good audio sounds.  Portions of the original were lost, and only in 2008 found....

Yesterday I featured Part 1 of this posting.  I left at #9, Supervolcanoes.  Here are the remaining eight ways Humanity could go extinct.  I will today particularly focus on what I've all my adult life feared most, nuclear war. #8  Solar Storms The most intense storm peaked in the September 1-2 period of 1859, and is known as the  Carrington Event .  Carrington was a British astronomer. The aurora borealis over the Rocky Mountains was so bright, that gold miners thought it was morning. Even Hawaii saw this phenomenon . Telegraphs gave operators shocks.  However, there is a much-publicized conversation between two operators in Boston and Portland ( Maine ) who were able to communicate without using batteries to power the line. If this were to happen today, the USA alone stands to lose $3.35 trillion to our general economy. Researchers examining carbon-14 tree rings and beryllium-10 in ice cores found two other major solar storms:  in the years 774-...