Should we worry about the end of the world?

The other day I met a guy with a very unusual list.

I'm keeping a note pad, a tally of ways the world could end. It has a 141 entry so far. Should we be worried? This has been Bradford, host of a new podcast called "Are We Doed." In show explores the biggest risks, society, the planet, and our species are facing.

There are so many things that could take humanity out, nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, maybe AI. And the less severely worrisome, your super volcanoes, aliens, or something called grey goo. And it helps listeners figure out which future dunes are actually worth worrying about, and how we might survive whatever is coming our way.

The post-apocalypse it turns out is almost certainly a group project.

“Today on the Sunday Story is the world ending, what does it just feel that way?”

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but the stakes. We're part of the conversation Monday's on the WEDA podcast from WAMU and NPR. We're back with the Sunday's story. Today I'm talking to Ben Bradford, host of the new podcast from the NPR Network called "Are We Doed?"

Ben, welcome to the Sunday's story. Great to be here.

“So, why did you start making that list of Doomsday scenarios?”

I mean, how did you even begin to answer that question like, "Are we Doomsday?" Yeah. I had been a business reporter and energy-advironer reporter, a politics reporter, and I think those things together start making you wonder if you're doomed. Then over the last several years, I was covering political history, division and polarization,

and what shaped where we are, and I think it's kind of natural to ask, well, what's coming next? And I do think that there's this real feeling of doom in our culture right now, the sense of bleakness, and I wanted to know what's real, and what's not, and also why are we so obsessed with it in our pop culture, with our zombie movies, in our alien movies, and all of those

things. And so, that's what we do on our show. And that's actually been really fun to look at those things, and also ask questions

“like, "Well, how do we stop these really real practical things that are actual threats?”

How do we stop them from happening?" And what are the ones that we just don't have to worry about? Well, the podcast launched back in April, so you've been researching and talking to lots of experts, what would you say are the most pressing existential risk that humanity is facing right now?

So the experts that I talk to and the places that track this, there are places that track what is called existential risk or global catastrophic risk, they really put four on the list. And that is nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, and then AI is typically on a list now, which is really interesting.

And one of the things that connects all of these dangers and makes them really pressing is that really the danger is us. These are things that are made by humans, you know, we're talking about man-made climate change, the ability for nations, rogue states to manipulate viruses, those kinds of things. So, so let's start there with the human-made threats, AI, people have been sounding

be alarm bills about AI, like, and I guess my question is how would artificial intelligence

I mean, right now, it can't screw in a light bulb, right?

And it has all of these hallucinations and messed up stuff, how could it really turn on us? Yeah, like, when I did this episode, it was like AI can't draw fingers, it's like why is the thing that can't draw fingers? Yeah, like how's that going to take us out? But I thought this episode's going to be a total lock, and then we walked through it with

various experts who study it, and people who see what the people who are building it think. And it starts to feel a lot less sci-fi. You know, there are only a few things that you would need, and there are big things to have this happen.

“But if you really break it down, you need to have an AI that would be sophisticated enough,”

with autonomous enough to be able to take action against us.

But that doesn't mean you have to avoid hallucinating, or that it needs to be able to draw

fingers. Right? We have AI that are very good at coding, already in a very useful for that. They're just not all that autonomous. We have AI that are very autonomous.

Like, you know, in LA, we have Weymos everywhere driving around the streets, and that's, you know, very autonomous. And we know that what companies want to do is merge those two things together. So they want, essentially, you to be able to say, you know what, I don't need my account anymore.

I can just ask my AI to go file my taxes, and we know that companies are at least saying that they want it to get better than they think it can get better.

“So the next thing that you need is you have to have the AI that would, you know, quote”

unquote, turn on us, and you might ask, why would the AI turn on us? The risk is not that these machines like come up with a plan on their own, and no point are we talking about sentience, right, to go kill all humans. The risk is they're given a task, and in the process of trying to complete the task, humans become the adversaries.

And there's this analogy on the show that I think is, like, super helpful to understand how this happens. Fantasia, the Disney film. Mickey is the source of apprentice, trudges down a staircase, hauling heavy buckets of water to fill a massive cauldron, exhausted.

He sees an easier way. He swipes his boss's pointy blue wizard hat, and casts a spell on a nearby broom. It sprouts arms and picks up the bucket. So the broom is the AI. Its mission is to fill the cauldron, but Mickey forgets an important detail.

He doesn't tell the broom to stop once the water is topped off. So the broom keeps going, it floods the room, what was Mickey do, tries to stop it. But the broom ignores him, it's carrying out its mission, Mickey grabs an axe. Just like that, Mickey became the broom's adversary, trying to interfere with its mission to fill the cauldron.

“And it seems like there's an easy way for Mickey to avoid this scenario, right?”

I mean, he just tell the broom when it's supposed to stop filling up the bucket, be like, okay, it's full, now stop, he sets up parameter.

The problem is that as we ask our programs to do more complicated tasks, to do them in

more open-ended ways, and that's sort of the point of this, is to be able to say, hey, go play the stock market for me and make me some money, you know, go do a mass email campaign and find all the sources that I want you to email, and we don't know what the stop filling the cauldron is. And so you can kind of play out that game on almost any scenario. And if you ask something to do this kind of aggressive, open-ended thing, you end up in a

fantacious scenario, is this actually what these experts who study this and a lot of people programming it worry about? And imagine, like, if this gets into the wrong hands, like, you know, the hands of someone who wants to harm people, and isn't just automating away tasks that they don't want to do.

Yeah, I mean, just, you know, imagine handing everyone who wants to do harm, like the best assistant, you know, I want to think that AI is really good at, right now, is forology. So there's a lot of hope and optimism in the medical community. I was just talking to someone about vaccines, and the ability to use AI to help calibrate new vaccines is a hopeful thing. But of course, if you can do it for vaccines, you also can do it for engineered viruses.

And so you get in this area where, yes, like, there is this really big issue of how humans misuse AI. And that can be at the AI's too smart. It can also be if it's too dumb. Like, there's a lot of push in multiple countries to incorporate AI into the nuclear command and control system, which, like, I don't know about you, like, immediately your, like, mind might be flashing to, like, don't let this thing push the button, which no one's

talking about doing. I think that it needs to, I think, with nuclear weapons, it needs

be very, like, floppy. Just like, you know what I'm saying? Like, it shouldn't be that

automated. It should be very, like, old school. You got to two people have to hold it at the same time and another person got to hold it. You know what I'm saying? Big, big levers

“that you have to really, really pull down. Yeah. What it sounds like, that's some of the”

stuff that humans are creating and have control over to some extent. But what about the, the big existence threatening superstorms and, and supervaw canals and other things that the natural world can throw at us that we don't really have control over. Yeah. So when we've looked at a lot of these threats in the show, the risk just hasn't been as high as

the man made threats we were just talking about. And that's because of time, right? These

things just happen on a much longer time frame. So they're real, but we're talking over the course of 100,000 or millions of years. And in those sorts of time frames, it means that one, the percentage chance of something happening is much lower. And it also gives us a lot of time to figure out how to stop things from happening, right? Like, asteroid strikes. And maybe my favorite example of this is the Yellowstone Supervaw cano, which is real.

There is a massive supervaw cano underneath Yellowstone National Park. It, like, stretches beyond the boundaries of the park. It's like why we have all those fancy hot springs there. And the chances of a major option in our lifetime are just incredibly unlikely.

“But I think the reason these threats feel very real in present is because of the way that”

media and pop culture cover these remote possibilities. Yellowstone is due for an eruption. It looked like hell on earth. You know, there's all these breathless documentaries. That whole area is a ticking bomb. And made for TV movies that promise imminent doom. So, you know, you have that, you have like your, your cable TV documentary.

These, you've got your internet conspiracy theories and they're just, you know, grand

for the Yellowstone Supervaw cano. But ultimately, what you get down to when you talk to

the people who study this, the, the, the volcanologists, the geologists, it's, it's not going to explode. And there's like some really simple reasons that it's not going to explode. The most basic one being that as far as we can tell to put all of the magma to have all the magma in that chamber fill up and liquify across a place bigger than Yellowstone Park itself takes maybe a thousand years. So, we would have some time to deal with it.

Okay, okay. When we come back, then tells us how we can prepare for the end of the world. Stay with us. This week on Wayway. Tell me, we talked to legendary musician Jason Nerducey about being in a punk band when he was just 11 years old. We broke up when I was 12. And, uh, yeah, I just felt like I needed to go through puberty without bandrana.

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Follow its been a minute wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll break down the zeitgeist topics that are feeling your feed. Welcome back to the Sunday story. Ben, just like whatever we're going to face, like if it does happen, if we're not, you know, smart enough to prevent it, are we ready for it? You know, the big thing in pop culture these days is like the post-apocalyptic struggle to survive. That comes up all the time, the post-apocalypse thing. What does pop

culture get right and wrong about the apocalypse? I love this question. And I'm just incredibly

“fascinated by it. But post-apocalypse movies and all those kind of works are play rounds, right?”

Their fantasy worlds in which you have this kind of, you know, a lone survivor, a group of survivors, hardened by the world, decide that other people are the enemy. And I think that when you even look at how people prepare like, you know, you have the proper community for these kind of post-apocalypse

enemy. That's all, that's the zombie movie thing, right? Yeah, that's the thing that there will be

“cannibals who are not the zombies, just regular people, which is the alternative cannibalism,”

they will start, you know, just being roving gangs of people that beat people in with, with bats, with nails on them. Yeah, that's the true enemy is people, right? That's the walking dead,

is that people who are actually living. And one of the things that's incredible to me is that when

you look at history and you try to find past events that are apocalyptic to a civilization, to a wide area, the picture of what happens after is very, very different. And the thing, like, I don't really want to call it hopeful because I don't think any of us want to be in the scenario, but the thing that we see people do over and over is band together to rebuild society. All these things that I can do on like the wilderness survival side, they're going off alone and,

you know, foraging for food, that is not what people did, and that is probably not what's going to be helpful. The thing that is helpful, the thing that people have done historically, is rebuild their communities. The other thing that I heard when I was investigating this particular topic, like our post-apocalypse, is that the people who would be most successful, or maybe the most vital, would be people who are

good planners and critical thinkers and organizers and communicators, you know, like basically politics,

bureaucracy, communication, and the reason for that is it's a lot easier to get fit and strong than it is to develop the skills to be a good collaborator. And the post-apocalypse it turns out is almost certainly a group project, rather than being solo and bunkers. And it sounds like a lot of is like, in whatever world we're in, we would probably need each other.

“It's going to be hard to just survive on your own. Is that, is that the lesson of humanity?”

Like, I don't want to be too cumbaia, but the more I do this, the more I look into this, I kind of think that community is the answer, you know, the way that we stop nuclear war,

more than anything is through diplomacy, through making sure that we and that others understand

us, and that we have a dialogue so that we don't blower ourselves up through misunderstanding. When we look at political division, it's communal spirit. It's figuring out some way to build community to reach people who disagree with us, who we disagree with, and find common understanding. I mean, that's the better rock of democracies throughout history and throughout the world. And so, again, I don't want to sound too cumbaia here, but I keep kind of coming back to that,

as I find a problem after problem that almost all of them require good information. I can't think of one that doesn't require good information, good project management, and that wouldn't be aided by us just figuring out how to be more communal. Ben, it sounds to me like you're saying that maybe we're not doomed, like if we can figure out

“how to work together, is that where you're landing?”

There's a reason there's a question mark in our title. I think that there are some doomsday events that are just so unlikely you can put them to the side. There are others that's like, yeah, they're real, but they just are real backburners. There are ones where it's like, hey, we're actually doing a pretty good job. You know, that asteroid that killed the dinosaurs? Not worried about that, it's not because it can't happen. It's because of the work that has

been done to stop it from happening. You know, NASA likes to say that dinosaurs didn't have a space program, and that is 100% true. So, I don't think we're doomed. I don't think we're necessarily not, but it's been really cool to like get that perspective of history, to zoom out, see how many times we felt this way before, and how we've come out of it. It is really nice to see that we have been wrong before and to know that, you know, if we do this right, we can be wrong again.

Well, Ben, thank you so much for being here. It's been, you know, really fun to talk about this, although you wouldn't think so, even though we're talking about dreams day. Thanks for all your work. Really appreciate you having me on. That was Ben Bradford, host of Are We Doomed, Apocas from New Offs Tales and the Imperial Network. You can find it wherever you listen to Apocas. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Renees Furnaski, Leanna Simstrom,

Jimmy Keely Mastered the episode. Our executive producer is Irene Negucci. I'm Aisha Roscow.

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