Humanity has never been this close to wiping itself out. We are just 90 seconds from self-destruction.
That is the warning from this year's update to the Doomsday Clock. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group of experts that manages and chooses the time of the clock, has warned that things are getting worse.
The clock had already stood at 100 seconds to midnight, itself closer than ever before. It had got stuck there the last three years, with officials warning in the last couple of years that the fact it hadn't moved wasn't anything to be happy about.
Then it moved. The clock is now at 90 seconds, down from 100, and with a warning that it could get even closer if things are not sorted out.
As the experts moved the clock, however, the warning they made was not really technological at all, but human. While the Bulletin said that they had considered a range of different, new concerns – climate change, the threat of yet more pandemics – they said that the clock had been adjusted primarily because of the war in Ukraine.
It feels, sadly, like we are stuck in time. The clock was built in 1947, at the start of the Cold War, when it was seven minutes to midnight; anyone who helped decide it then would probably find this year's threats of nuclear annihilation and global warfare disappointingly familiar.
But, at the same time, the experts behind the Bulletin noted that humanity had built these threats. Given that, it surely has the power to reverse them, and it is worth remembering that the origins both of the war and the weapons that will be used to fight it are built by our own hands.
And – as this newsletter has hopefully been testament to – those destructive and dangerous technologies are being counteracted by new innovation for good. Even as we build the means to destroy ourselves, we find the ways to elevate ourselves, too.
In past years, for instance, the Bulletin has focused on climate change and its dangers, and it remains a clear danger. But almost every week this newsletter focuses on some new innovation, a remarkable new invention that offers a hint at how humanity might build its way out of the problem it made for itself.
It has also warned about the dangers of misinformation – and did so again this year, as one of the many factors that have inflamed the war in Ukraine. But it is not to play down the threat of those lies to say that the world has remained remarkably resistant to disinformation so far, and that powerful and truthful stories still allow us to understand the full horror of what is going on in Ukraine.
Previous years have also seen a focus on the dangers of artificial intelligence, and this year has seen plenty of that, too. But after panic over the ways that AI could enable certain kinds of dangerous deepfake, for instance, or computers that are able to wreak havoc on their own, this year has mostly played host to AI-generated art and intrigue about technologies such as ChatGPT. Those come with their own problems, of course – that art is often heavily reliant on taking the work of human artists, and ChatGPT could lead to widespread cheating – but even those problems are mostly peaceful.
As ever, there is a lot to worry about. And any cause for optimism should not mean blocking out the important threats that risk the very existence of life on Earth.
But they are a reminder that humanity does have it within itself to innovate its way out of problems, even if it innovated its way into them in the first place. Let's hope this is the year that technology starts pushing that clock backwards.
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Keep a civil tongue.