logo
Here's how the world will end — a risk expert's guide

Here's how the world will end — a risk expert's guide

Times4 days ago
This is not a book for the anxious. It tells of the collapse of empires and the potential for the implosion of human society.
In his marshalling of existential risks the author Luke Kemp deploys apocalyptic prose. 'It is deceptively easy to think about killer drones, AI and nuclear weapons as being separate, isolatable threats,' he writes before delivering the kicker: 'They are not.' Instead Kemp talks about a 'tree of doom' in which hierarchy, inequality and war are central.
This weighty tome aims to emulate the impact of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and similar doorstoppers. But that kind of book requires an author to possess exceptional gifts. I find myself wondering how anyone can hold forth authoritatively on such a broad range of topics such as palaeolithic lifestyles, inequality in ancient Rome and the spread of microplastics. The answer, I think, is that you are either a polymath like Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose book Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years succeeded in telling a broad swathe of history, or, like Harari, you are such a great explainer of complex phenomena that people don't look too closely at the details.
Kemp aspires to greater things than his predecessors: an even broader view of how humanity developed and how it soon might end. However, he concedes that the first section, about the emergence of hierarchical societies, contains a lot of educated guesswork. 'We don't know when exactly empires and states came to capture most of the human population … at best, states dominate less than 0.5 per cent of the human timeline.'
In the middle section, about the rise and fall of empires such as imperial China, Kemp is on less shaky ground. There's some great detail here, for example: 'Ten to 25 per cent of men above the age of 17 were deployed for combat in the Roman republic. At its peak Rome had an army of about 400,000 to 500,000 men.' But sic transit gloria mundi — military prowess was not enough to preserve this or other civilisations. Kemp says: 'In every case prior to the collapse [of an empire] there is a slow growth in inequality, oligarchy, corruption and factionalism between elites over the surplus of lootable resources.'
All of this sets the scene for the troubling present, our future dystopia and possible extinction, which forms the final section. Kemp works with the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk so this is his bread and butter. He allows for nuance — for different interpretations of the risks arising from climate change, biotech, nuclear weapons and AI — but at the heart of it he believes there is a chance of 'a single gargantuan crash' due to our 'hyperconnected, hyperhomogenous and hyperaccelerated systems'.

At this point you can almost imagine Kemp's editor urging him: 'For God's sake, give the reader something to live for!' And he tries. 'Most of the challenges we face are entirely solvable,' he writes. His suggested remedies include banning nuclear weapons, addressing climate change, creating more equal societies and limiting AI.
In a section bravely titled Don't Be a Dick! he argues that we can all make a positive difference by eating less meat, turning down certain jobs and shunning particular types of politics. Yet a few chapters earlier Kemp argues that the idea 'we are all to blame … is a manufactured distraction. The reality is that a mere handful of giant corporations, countries and militaries are responsible for the great majority of catastrophic risk.' So are we individually empowered or not? Here's where Kemp's thesis begins to fray badly because not all of us live in societies where change can be brought about democratically.
If you ask me which country is stripping the world's resources at an unprecedented rate, has the biggest state funding of AI, is most rapidly increasing its stock of nuclear weapons and is home to numerous laboratories containing lethal pathogens, the answer is the same: China. But modern China is hardly mentioned in this book.
Instead Kemp's focus is almost exclusively on the US. I don't doubt there are reasons to watch Google or the Pentagon closely, but with some shareholder and democratic accountability, I fancy we have a better chance of finding out what's going on in these places than we do in some Chinese AI project or biolab. This lack of interest in the sources of risk outside the western world extends to countries like India and Brazil.
A book covering this great swathe of time, societal models, scientific progress and risk requires an Olympian detachment, the ultimate long view. But instead what the reader ultimately gets are the comforting 'progressive' orthodoxies of the 21st-century western academic world.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Google unveils AI that deciphers missing Latin words in ancient Roman inscriptions
Google unveils AI that deciphers missing Latin words in ancient Roman inscriptions

The Independent

time4 hours ago

  • The Independent

Google unveils AI that deciphers missing Latin words in ancient Roman inscriptions

Google 's DeepMind has unveiled a new artificial intelligence tool capable of deciphering and contextualising ancient texts, including Roman-era Latin inscriptions. The new AI, named Aeneas, could be a transformative tool that can assist historians expand our understanding of the past, the tech giant said on Thursday. A study published in the journal Nature demonstrated that Aeneas could predict missing parts of Latin inscriptions from the ancient Roman period. Even though writing was common in the Roman world, texts recovered by historians from the time period are often fragmentary, weathered, or defaced. Restoring and dating these texts is nearly impossible without contextual information and hence historians attempt to identify 'parallels' – which are texts with similarities in wording, syntax, standardised formulas or provenance. Aeneas can accelerate this contextualisation process, predict missing text, even when the length is uncertain, researchers say. 'It reasons across thousands of Latin inscriptions, retrieving textual and contextual parallels in seconds that allow historians to interpret and build upon the model's findings,' DeepMind said in a statement. 'Aeneas sets a new state-of-the-art benchmark in restoring damaged texts and predicting when and where they were written,' the AI firm said, adding that the tool also been developed to include visual imagery in its considerations. In the new study, scientists and historians launched a collaborative study to assess inscriptions dating from the seventh century BC to the eighth century AD. Historians found that the context suggestions provided by Aeneas were useful in 90 per cent of cases and improved their confidence in key tasks by 44 per cent. When historians worked with the AI model, they could see better results in restoration and geographical attribution tasks than when Aeneas or the scholars worked alone. The study found that the AI could date events within a 13-year time frame. Researchers hope the AI model can also be adapted to other ancient languages to decipher scripts from papyri to coinage, expanding its capabilities, and help draw connections across a wider range of historical evidence. Aeneas works by taking an inscription's text and image as input. Scientists trained the AI model using a 'large and reliable dataset' that draws from decades of work by historians to create digital collections, including EDR – a searchable resource that provides texts, bibliographic information, and descriptive data for Latin and Greek inscriptions from ancient Italy. Researchers organised these collections into a more accessible dataset of over 176,000 Latin inscriptions from across the ancient Roman world. After processing the text image of an inscription, the AI model relies on some of its specialised internal networks to restore characters and date the text, while geographical attribution also uses images of the inscriptions as input. Aeneas then contextualises the text by retrieving a list of parallels, creating a 'kind of historical fingerprint' of what the text says, its language, when and where it came from, and how it relates to other inscriptions, researchers explained. Scientists found that the AI could restore damaged inscriptions with an accuracy of 73 per cent in gaps of up to ten characters. When Aeneas assessed one of the most famous Roman inscriptions: the Res Gestae Divi Augusti – Emperor Augustus' first-person account of his achievements – it predicted two possible dates, one at around 10-1 BC and a more confident prediction of between 10 to 20 AD, much in line with a long-standing debate among historians. 'These findings are supported by the results of an extensive historian–AI evaluation, in which historians confirmed that Aeneas can seamlessly integrate into research workflows and provide a transformative aid for historical inquiry,' researchers wrote.

Google develops AI tool that fills missing words in Roman inscriptions
Google develops AI tool that fills missing words in Roman inscriptions

The Guardian

timea day ago

  • The Guardian

Google develops AI tool that fills missing words in Roman inscriptions

In addition to sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system and public health, the Romans also produced a lot of inscriptions. Making sense of the ancient texts can be a slog for scholars, but a new artificial intelligence tool from Google DeepMind aims to ease the process. Named Aeneas after the mythical Trojan hero, the program predicts where and when inscriptions were made and makes suggestions where words are missing. Historians who put the program through its paces said it transformed their work by helping them identify similar inscriptions to those they were studying, a crucial step for setting the texts in context, and proposing words to fill the inevitable gaps in worn and damaged artefacts. 'Aeneas helps historians interpret, attribute and restore fragmentary Latin texts,' said Dr Thea Sommerschield, a historian at the University of Nottingham who developed Aeneas with the tech firm. 'That's the grand challenge that we set out to tackle.' Inscriptions are among the most important records of life in the ancient world. The most elaborate can cover monument walls, but many more take the form of decrees from emperors, political graffiti, love poems, business records, epitaphs on tombs and writings on everyday life. Scholars estimate that about 1,500 new inscriptions are found every year. 'What makes them unique is that they are written by the ancient people themselves across all social classes,' said Sommerschield. 'It's not just history written by the victors.' But there is a problem. The texts are often broken into pieces or so ravaged by time that parts are illegible. And many inscribed objects have been scattered over the years, making their origins uncertain. The Google team led by Yannis Assael worked with historians to create an AI tool that would aid the research process. The program is trained on an enormous database of nearly 200,000 known inscriptions, amounting to 16m characters. Aeneas takes text, and in some cases images, from the inscription being studied and draws on its training to build a list of related inscriptions from 7BC to 8AD. Rather than merely searching for similar words, the AI identifies and links inscriptions through deeper historical connections. Having trained on the rich collection of inscriptions, the AI can assign study texts to one of 62 Roman provinces and estimate when it was written to within 13 years. It also provides potential words to fill in any gaps, though this has only been tested on known inscriptions where text is blocked out. In a test run, researchers set Aeneas loose on a vast inscription carved into monuments around the Roman empire. The self-congratulatory Res Gestae Divi Augusti describes the life achievements of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Aeneas came up with two potential dates for the work, either the first decade BC or between 10 and 20AD. The hedging echoes the debate among scholars who argue over the same dates. In another test, Aeneas analysed inscriptions on a votive altar from Mogontiacum, now Mainz in Germany, and revealed through subtle linguistic similarities how it had been influenced by an older votive altar in the region. 'Those were jaw-dropping moments for us,' said Sommerschield. Details are published in Nature and Aeneas is available to researchers online. In a collaboration, 23 historians used Aeneas to analyse Latin inscriptions. The context provided by the tool was helpful in 90% of cases. 'It promises to be transformative,' said Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge. Jonathan Prag, a co-author and professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford, said Aeneas could be run on the existing corpus of inscriptions to see if the interpretations could be improved. He added that Aeneas would enable a wider range of people to work on the texts. 'The only way you can do it without a tool like this is by building up an enormous personal knowledge or having access to an enormous library,' he said. 'But you do need to be able to use it critically.'

Gaps in what we know about ancient Romans could be filled by AI
Gaps in what we know about ancient Romans could be filled by AI

BBC News

timea day ago

  • BBC News

Gaps in what we know about ancient Romans could be filled by AI

A new AI tool has the potential to turbocharge our understanding of all human history, researchers intelligence has already been used to fill in gaps in ancient Roman scrolls, but a new system goes much can fill in missing words from ancient Roman inscriptions carved on monuments and everyday objects, as well as dating and placing them often introduces errors in its analysis of even simple modern texts, so there are concerns that relying too much on this technology might distort rather than enhance our understanding of history. But historian Prof Dame Mary Beard of Cambridge University has described the technology as potentially "transformative" to our study of past said that the system, called Aeneas, after a Greek and Roman mythological figure, could accelerate the rate at which historians piece together the past from ancient texts."Breakthroughs in this very difficult field have tended to rely on the memory, the subjective judgement and the hunch/guesswork of individual scholars, supported by traditional, encyclopaedic databases. Aeneas opens up entirely new horizons." Ancient inscriptions are usually incomplete, of unknown origin and date, and often all three. Historians and classicists attempt to fill in the blanks by drawing on texts that are similar in wording, grammar, appearance and cultural setting, known as 'parallels'. Ancient inscriptions tend to be formulaic so historians can often infer what the missing part of a sentence goes on to process is painstaking and can take months and years but opens new vistas in our understanding of the past, according to Dr Thea Sommerschield, an historian at Nottingham University, who co-led the research."Inscriptions are the earliest forms of writing. They are so precious to historians because they offer first-hand evidence for ancient histories, languages and societies."But they degrade over the centuries and interpreting them is like solving a gigantic jigsaw puzzle with tens of thousands of pieces, of which 90 per cent are lost." It's not the first time AI has been used to join up the missing dots in Roman this year, another team of scientists digitally "unwrapped" a badly burnt scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum using a combination of X-ray imaging and AI, revealing rows and columns of Sommerschield developed Aeneas along with her co-research leader Dr Yannis Assael, an AI specialist at Google DeepMind. It automates the process of contextualising based on parallels, in the blink of an eye. Aeneas draws on a vast database of of 176,000 Roman inscriptions including images and uses a carefully designed AI system to pull up a range of relevant historical parallels, to support the work of historians, according to Dr Assael."What the historian can't do is assess these parallels in a matter of seconds across tens of thousands of inscriptions, and that is where AI can come in as an assistant."The team tested out the system in dating a famous Roman text at the Temple of Augustus in Ankara in Turkey, known as the queen of inscriptions because of its importance to our understanding of Roman history. The Res Gestae Divi Augusti was composed by the first Roman Emperor, Augustus, giving an account of his life and accomplishments. Its date is hotly contested among was able to narrow down the options to two possible ranges, the most likely being between 10 and 20 CE and a second slightly less likely range from 10 to 1 BCE. This showed the system's accuracy as most historians agree on these two as the most likely possibilities. In tests of the system with 23 historians the team found that an historian working with Aeneas came up with more accurate results than either Aeneas on its own or an historian on their own. "The feedback was that Aeneas was not only allowing the historians to accelerate their work but it also revealed parallels that they had previously not identified," according to Dr Sommerschield."And that is the future value of this work, not just to do what we do faster and better but also to do things we didn't think to do before."AI interpretation of even modern texts can be glitchy, so there is concern that mistakes could be made. But according to Dr Assael, Aeneas is a tool to guide historians, not a replacement for them."We acknowledge that AI might not be able to get everything right all the time and I don't think historians will work under that expectation," he said it would be down to human historians to weigh up Aeneus' predictions and decide which made more sense.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store