Is the news that a bot created by OpenAI successfully hacked into Medibank the beginning of the end? Possibly. A number of experts have predicted that AI will bring about human extinction.
Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has declared that there is a 10 to 20 per cent chance of this happening before 2100. Elon Musk has backed him up. Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI guru, is even more pessimistic, estimating the probability of extinction at higher than 95 per cent.
I’m sceptical. Human extinction has been on scientists’ to-do list for decades. The headlines cycle through threats of collisions with meteors, global warming, global cooling, plagues, eruptions of supervolcanoes, and nuclear war.
And now AI.
None of these are absolutely impossible. But the emotional wellspring for the current panic is fundamentally religious – or, rather, irreligious: the prospect of facing the End Times without a theological framework which makes life and the extinction of life meaningful.
The classic example of this is the 1957 novel On the Beach, by Nevil Shute, which is about to celebrate its 60th anniversary.
It depicts life in Melbourne in the months after countries in the northern hemisphere have lobbed 5000 atomic bombs on each other. It was Australia’s first international best-seller and it has never been out of print.
Director Stanley Kramer turned the story into an Oscar-nominated film 1959 starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. Like the novel, it is stark and bleak – especially in black and white.
The calm, carry-on, stiff-upper-lip characters in On the Beach made its message even more poignant for a world which is just as jittery about AI as our grandparents were of The Bomb. In their day, the book and film were sensational and terrifying. They still pack a punch.
The plot unfolds a few months after the nuclear war, about which few details are given. The world’s atmosphere is saturated with radioactive fallout and winds are carrying the contamination inexorably into the southern hemisphere.
In city by city, from Cairns, to Rockhampton, to Brisbane, to Sydney, everyone dies. The characters of the novel prepare for death as radio broadcasts from the northern cities go silent one after another.
The hero is Commander Dwight Towers, the straitlaced commander of an American submarine stranded in Melbourne. He is ordered to return underwater to Seattle to investigate intermittent bursts of morse code from possible survivors. They turn out to be random signals generated by a broken window swaying over a telegraph key.
With all of his superiors dead, he is the acting head of the US Navy.
Back in Melbourne, people embark upon projects to distract them from imminent death – car races in which as many drivers die as finish, planting their dream gardens, drinking cellars of fine wine, or even learning shorthand. The government distributes free suicide pills.
Eventually, the fallout arrives, bringing unstoppable vomiting and diarrhoea. Everyone tucks into their voluntary assisted dying pills. The Australian liaison officer on the sub and his wife take theirs after giving their infant a lethal injection.
Dwight takes his boat out to sea to sink it. The woman who loves him watches from a headland and as the sub disappears beneath the waves, she takes one of the pills.
Australia is left to its rabbits, which apparently are far more resistant to radiation poisoning.
Six decades later, what strikes you about On the Beach is not simply the absence of a religious dimension, but of any transcendental dimension at all. It is quite passionless. The epigraph for the novel is T.S. Eliot’s famous line: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Almost no one questions their fate or cosmic injustice of perishing because of other countries’ wars. Job protested, groaned, and wept – but the characters in On the Beach accept their fate stoically, without complaint.
After all, if there is No One to complain to, the annihilation of humanity may not be such a big deal. We cannot look forward to a Last Judgment in which all the injustices of history are set right, the virtuous are crowned and evildoers are condemned.
Perhaps this explains why people are panicking about AI extinction. Belief in the End Times without a belief in God is a combination guaranteed to send your stress levels soaring.
Speaking of the End Times, as Ava Gardner was leaving Australia, a reporter asked her what she thought of Melbourne.
She reportedly said that it was “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world.” Her quip was quickly forgotten in Melbourne but had a long half-life in Sydney.
