Keen On

Few of the world’s great scientists have given more thought to the existential threats to humanity than the irrepressible British cosmologist and astronomer Martin Rees. He’s the co-founder of Cambridge University’s Centre for Existential Risk as well as the author of the 2003 book Our Final Hour. So it’s striking that Rees has a quite different take on the existential risk of artificial intelligence technology than many AI doomers including yesterday’s guest, the 2024 Physics Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. For Rees, bio-threats and network collapse represents the most dangerous technological threats to humanity in the near future. Unlike nuclear weapons, which require massive detectable infrastructure, Rees warns, dangerous pathogens can be engineered in small, unmonitored laboratories. Meanwhile, our civilization's complete dependence on interconnected global networks means system failures could trigger catastrophic societal breakdown within days. Apocalypse now? Perhaps. But, according to the prescient Re