6 ways humankind might accidentally bring about the ‘techpocalypse’ | Digital Trends - Emerging Tech

Photo: Luke Dormehl

"They may sound like scenarios from a Michael Crichton thriller, but here are six plausible ways that technology could bring down life as we know it" writes Luke Dormehl, UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends.

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Here in 2017, technology’s pretty great. It’s helping us live longer, healthier lives, with more access to education and entertainment, and tools like artificial intelligence and gene-editing are providing new ways to solve major problems. But not everything about technology is swell. As the cultural theorist Paul Virilio once noted, the inventor of the ship is also the inventor of the shipwreck. In other words, no matter how good technology might look, there’s always something that can go wrong.

On that cheery note, here are six of the most likely ways we might spring the techpocalypse on ourselves.

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The arrival of superintelligence and the technological singularity is based on the assumption that it’s possible for A.I. to one day possess abilities greater than our own. Compared to humans who are limited by biological evolution, machines could then improve and redesign themselves at an ever increasing pace; becoming smarter all the time. At this point, enormous changes would inevitably take place in human society — which have the possibility of posing an existential risk to humankind.

It’s impossible to predict how an entity more intelligence than us would behave, but the results could be anything from machines wiping out humanity, Terminator-style, to enslaving the world’s population. Heck, combine artificial intelligence with nanotechnology and you might get a scenario like…

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The words “grey goo” are rarely associated with positive life experiences. This particular hypothesis is one which has arisen with the advance of nanotechnology, in which self-replicating nanotechnology consumes all the matter on our planet.

It was first proposed by nanotechnology expert Kim Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation, in which he writes that: “Imagine … a replicator floating in a bottle of chemicals, making copies of itself… The first replicator assembles a copy in one thousand seconds, the two replicators then build two more in the next thousand seconds, the four build another four, and the eight build another eight. At the end of 10 hours, there are not 36 new replicators, but over 68 billion. In less than a day, they would weigh a ton; in less than two days, they would outweigh the Earth; in another four hours, they would exceed the mass of the sun and all the planets combined – if the bottle of chemicals hadn’t run dry long before.”

The idea was shocking enough that it prompted the U.K.’s future monarch Prince Charles to call the Royal Society to investigate it. Right now the technology for self-replicating nanobots doesn’t exist. But, hey, there’s always tomorrow!
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Source: Digital Trends