As does most progress. In the last 70 years the world has statistically become more peaceful, and we have had the capability to destroy ourselves throughout that time frame, which I know is a blip in human history but it's something. Some people would argue we're currently going through the "great filter" phase of civilizations, atomic bombs being the start of it and developments in AI being the next hurdle.

Stick to physics, clearly you know next to nothing about computer science.

How does computer science play into this?  Am I missing something?

This so much!

This. I've saying it for a while... we'll be the ones to end ourselves.

Heh, I just had a funny idea today before even reading about this. I read something else though, and it gave me some funny ideas. Namely, I think there's a fair chance that once technology evolves sufficiently, we'll get Deus Ex and start implanting stuff to improve ourselves. Sooner or later we'll all be practically some sort of cyborgs, and at some point we're probably bound to start augmenting our brains as well. That's a slippery slope, and at some point we could reach a situation where there's more machine than human in us, and we'd have replaced ourselves by robots - voluntarily, all by ourselves (with possible help from the robots we created).

Of course it'll be a long time before we reach that point, and there's other ways things could go too. But that way seems, eh, natural. I almost feel like we should actively take steps to prevent that if we don't want it, because with the constant urge to improve, it'll be hard to resist such easy improvements.

He's not referring to computer science alone. And assuming you're referring to AI, it's a real threat at the very least until development evolves quite significantly to reduce the number of programming mistakes (i.e. bugs). With the current ways of  development, producing bugs, even dangerous ones, is dangerously easy. And that's not even the only way things could go wrong with AI. Personally I'm not foreseeing any concrete threats in AI development but acknowledging that the risks are there is important.

Isn't this obvious? Really, am I the only one that was a kid and realized "hey, humans are quite scary. we'll probably end up killing ourselves".


If we don't end up successfully colonizing a different place, I wouldn't mind. Humans have created quite the amount of destruction. Let nature take the tide and do what it wants

Genetically engineered viruses are a legitimate threat, as they cannot be controlled, especially in the hands off nutjobs like kim or ISIS

dat reading comprehension tho.

Nah. Troll.

The interesting thing here for me is the idea that the ultimate hope of humankind is that we must eventually find a way to colonize other planets.  If we don't, as resources run dry at a quickening rate, then we'll eventually turn Earth into Dune--well, maybe not with the giant Sandworms, but it will get bad.  Then all that technology will be used to fight over dwindling resources.

As there have been hundreds, likely even thousands, of science fictions stories and novels on that very subject, then probably not.