We're paying now for the industrial revolution with climate change and oil wars verging on WW3. The messy transition is still fully ongoing with the hope now that AI will fix the mess from the industrial revolution. It comes awfully close to sunk cost fallacy, pump more resources into AI in the hope it will solve climate change, food and water shortage. Things that we can already solve without AI, yet capitalism stands in the way. So while I do think AI can certainly help to optimize food, water and combat climate change (put AI to use to speed up Nuclear Fusion research/improvements, solar panel production and transition to hydrogen fuel cell economy) I don't think the current political and economic environment allow for that. I'm afraid in the current climate AI will only accelerate civilizations' downfall. So far it provides a great distraction from tackling actual real problems.

AI is using insane amounts of our natural resources relative to the benefits it offers.
Generative AI is almost always garbage.
AI hesitant, especially the recent AI and huge data centers.

Natural disaster-related deaths and global conflict deaths are both at or near an all-time low, as far back as we can glimpse into the historical record, though. We're talking 90-99% drops in the past 100-200 years.

In that regard, it seems like we got away pretty well with increasing world GDP 100x since the Industrial Revolution...

Damages in USD and the number of displaced people have increased recently, granted, but that's a consequence of a larger human population and more infrastructure and means of transportation for the most part.

38 million deaths from economic sanctions doesn't sound like an all time low!
https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-02-pi-briefing-no-28-38-million-lives/en/

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-war-may-push-45-million-people-into-acute-hunger-by-june-wfp-says-2026-03-17/
pushing acute hunger tally over it's current all time record

Shit is hitting the fan now. The explosive growth from the industrial revolution is now taking its toll.

Neither.

AI, in its current form, is one of the worst things the human race has ever invented and is overwhelmingly terrible for society, humanity, and the planet, but it also won't be the end of the world.

It's 99% empty hype and to say it will kill us all is giving it far too much credit.

Yes, that's an all-time low. I honestly think you haven't internalized how much death and suffering there used to exist in this world.

Take the year 1800, for instance, when we got to a nice round 1 billion people, while child mortality in pre-industrial times was 50%. With an average of 45 births per 1000, that alone gets us to 22 million dead children in that single year, which beats the number you quoted (even if we were to take it at face value), adjusted per total population and per year, by a factor of over a hundred. That's without even getting into the millions of adults who passed before their time that year from disease, hunger, etc.

Another thing to show how uncalibrated your pessimistic bias is, estimate how much of a % change in extreme poverty, hunger, and illiteracy you think there has been in the past 20 years ---a period that includes both a pandemic and a large recession, mind you---, and then look up the answer online. I'd bet you'd be surprised.

There's no "shit hitting the fan" anywhere, and if anything, that sort of thinking is prone to paralyze otherwise intelligent people from engaging in useful political and social action because they imagine everything is horrible and that there will be some sort of karmic civilizational comeuppance coming soon.

I am an optimist. But to explain, I am not a blind "AI will save us all" guy. In my opinion AI is just a technology like many before. Like pretty much all technologies there are downsides and problem, but also potential and advantages. We need to balance this. So I am also very in favor of AI regulations, to limit the problems arising from it.

As we are a gaming forum, some of the potentials I see. For one I think it is very beneficial for indie devs. Games often need skills in many different areas, and it may be difficult for a small team or even a single person to cover everything. But AI can fill the holes while the humans still create the stuff they are proficient in. This means more gates are broken down and game making becomes accessible for more people. Another advantage I see in the big amount of tedious uncreative work that nowadays bigger games have. For instance humans have to create every rock, tree, bush etc. in a big open world. With AI you can designate an area as a forest, let AI fill it with matching stuff and then humans add the things that are actually important for the game.

I think I've seen Unreal Engine 5 do this, and I'm guessing it's not by utilizing AI. You don't really need AI for relatively simple stuff like forests. You don't need it even for some more complex stuff, but the more complex the environment, the more time it takes to create an algorithm that can handle it, so AI is probably a more viable option for more complex environments. But for something like forests, I'm pretty sure you don't need AI, and I also don't think AI is going to get utilized there because there's probably more cost-efficient methods already available.

I am pretty sure UE5 has a lot of AI tools. And the forest was an example. AI can take tedious work and fill scenes with unomportant background details while humans focus on the stuff that is actually important for the game.

Yeah, it almost certainly does at this point, but I think the forest thing was before AI got nowhere near where it is now. But yeah, AI can definitely assist in a lot of that work - just need to be careful to not use AI where more traditional methods would be a better choice.