The clock of destruction or doomsday clock remains at 90 seconds before midnight, just like last year.
For those who do not know it Doomsday Clock, with its hands hovering near midnight (“Doomsday”), is a symbolic one device which is designed to warn the world how close it is to destruction.
Midnight is said to represent the point at which the Earth will become uninhabitable by mankind.
The watch dates back to the early days of the Cold War. It was created as an integral feature of a journal called the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
In its 2024 announcement on Tuesday, the Bulletin said China, Russia and the US are spending huge sums to “expand or modernize their nuclear arsenals” – which adds a bonus to the “permanent risk of nuclear war by mistake or miscalculation".
The war in Ukraine also created a "persistent risk of nuclear escalation."
But the interesting thing about 2024 is that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists added “AI” to the list of threats they consider to be existential threats to humanity, but did not move the hands of the clock as a result of this addition as a new threat.
My point is that they do see AI as a threat, but a very low level one.
This of course makes me wonder: then why did they add her?
