Existential threats to humanity are soaring this year

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Put aside your politics and look at the world clinically, and you’ll see the three areas many experts consider existential threats to humanity worsening in 2023.

Why it matters: This isn’t meant to start your day with doom and gloom. But focus your mind on how the threats of nuclear catastropherising temperatures and all-powerful AI capabilities are spiking worldwide.

  • It underscores the urgent need for smart people running government โ€” and big companies โ€” to solve increasingly complex problems at faster rates.

Climate: The danger is becoming impossible to ignore, Axios’ Andrew Freedman writes.

  • You just lived through the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. The worldโ€™s oceans are absurdly warm, with temperatures in the 90sยฐ around the Florida Keys, bleaching and even killing coral reefs in just one week.
  • Antarctic sea ice is plummeting even in the dead of winter. Wildfires are raging.
  • Climate scientists donโ€™t relish saying, โ€œI told you so,โ€ but they’ve been warning for years that each seemingly incremental rise in global average temperatures would translate into severe heat waves, droughts, floods and stronger hurricanes.
  • And the worst part is, we can’t even call this our “new normal,” because it’s going to keep getting worse as long as carbon emissions keep increasing.
  • This is a global problem that will require a global solution, but tensions between the world’s top two emitters โ€” the U.S. and China โ€” are high, and getting the big global powers to abide by a sufficiently hardcore climate commitment has so far proven impossible.

AI: The technology’s top architects say there’s a non-zero chance it’ll destroy humanity โ€” and they don’t really know how or why it works, Axios’ Ryan Heath reports.

  • AI โ€” with its ability to mass-produce fake videos, soundbites and images โ€” poses clear risks to Americans’ already tenuous trust in elections and institutions.

Nukes: China has expanded its nuclear arsenal on land, air and sea โ€” raising the likelihood of a dangerous new world with three, rather than two, nuclear superpowers, Axios’ Sam Baker writes.

By Andrew Freedman, Ryan Heath, Sam Baker

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