> Of course, we've had the ability to extinct ourselves for decades

This gets mentioned often in various doomer narratives, but I question how true it is. A global thermonuclear war would be terrible and would bring us back to the stone age, but I reckon it would come far far short of causing mankind to go extinct.

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drdeca 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What if the bombs were designed to kill everyone, not just those in some region? Like, to release polonium in the upper atmosphere or something?

	▲	mplanchard an hour ago \| parent [-]
		nuclear winter doesn’t discriminate based on region

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shimman 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean it's likely a nuclear war would probably be a species extinction level event at the least, humans would definitely be reduced by 99%. We don't know how bad the resulting nuclear cooling would be, but we do know how humans act under extreme desperation. They lash out and attack, when was the last time a majority of human settles were truly under desperate acts of survival simultaneously?

Maybe what ~74,000 years ago (Toba eruption)? Okay, now how would this look in the age of industrial societies and modern nation states? I don't think it would fare well at all.

Probably the only realistic "modern" idea we have is the novel "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Although maybe this is too bleak, even under extreme duress humans still show resilience + compassion toward others even while enduring human horrors.

	▲	jandrewrogers 11 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Nuclear winter scenarios have largely been debunked. Several different events in the 20th century had atmospheric impact on the same scale as modeled in a full nuclear exchange and the effects were modest. People have kind of mythologized nuclear weapons far beyond their reality. One of the arguments against the use of nukes in policy circles is that this mythology is useful. The limited adverse environmental consequences in practice if demonstrated will greatly lower the threshold for subsequent use. It might set society back a century, but with substantial knowledge of what was lost. Extinction from nuclear weapons is not remotely plausible.
	▲	pstuart an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If the AI wanted to wipe humans out it would have to have a sizable fleet of capable robots, as keeping the lights on over time is not just about calling APIs.