alt Hacker NewsPeople were feeling doomtastic about nuclear weapons during the Cold War as well.
Listen to the words of this song written in 1969: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2JcxHX-8Xc
When every man is torn apart
With nightmares and with dreams
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
When silence drowns the screams
Confusion will be my epitaph
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying
You don't have help. But perhaps you could at least avoid discouraging people unnecessarily?
*EDIT*: There are about 5 replies to this comment making roughly the same point. I'm not sure which to reply to, so I'll just reply here.
I'm not claiming that our execution as a species around nuclear weapons has been flawless. I'm not claiming that we are out of the woods with regard to nukes. I'm just trying to push back against defeatism and fatalism. Some felt a sense of inevitable doom during the Cold War. It's been decades now, and nuclear doom still isn't here! Our situation is dire, but not hopeless.
Replies
I lived through roughly the latter half of the cold war and both of my parents were soldiers. I lived in West Germany etc.
No we have not escaped the nuclear thing. If anything, the current Russian tzar is rather more unhinged than any of his predecessors.
I doubt many here know what perestroika and glasnost mean or why those Russian words were so important back in the day.
I don't fear AI (where on earth would an "autonomous" AI manage to find the power requirements). Darleks can't really fly and LLMs will stop when you pull the plug!
I do fear numpties with a red button and a tenuous grip on reality.
We have had nuclear weapons for less than a century. It takes one guy, one time for it to all go to shit. We are not out of the woods yet and we will never be.
Except we did had a bunch of close calls [1]. Also, we've been warned about climate change for at least 30 years and were unable to avoid it. So OP's remark is entirely deserved.
Until proven otherwise, we are not part of a movie where the hero saves the day at the end. I thought 9/11 made it pretty clear to everyone?
[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0...
We have not made it. We have survived so far but the threat remains. Stockpiles and warheads have shrunk, so it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as in, say, 1983, but we’re still one mistake or misunderstanding away from the worst day in human existence.
And worse, somehow we’ve managed to declare victory without achieving it, and there’s no longer any real attention on actually fixing the problem.
If AI follows the same example, we’ll take some measures to lessen the impact of Armageddon and then carry on saying “problem solved!”
> Ultimately, we have made it
Spinning the present situation or the history of nuclear arms as a high-five, "go team human!" success story is... quite the take (Vasili Arkhipov, Cuban missile crisis generally, the current doomsday clock being "the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history").
> You don't have help. But perhaps you could at least avoid discouraging people unnecessarily?
More germanely, you don't have to worry yourself, but at least avoid discouraging people with legitimate worries who want to take precautions. Even the present situation with nuclear weapons, precarious as it is, would likely be more precarious were it not for the political pressure of the people worrying in the 1950s and 1960s and up to today.