The Doomsday Clock is now set at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to implosion. The proximity to midnight reflects the scale of escalating global threats. The clock is a unique timepiece created 78 years ago by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as a symbol to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world. Over the past 78 years, the clock’s time has changed according to how close scientists believe the human race has gotten to total destruction. In some years, they adjust the time, and in others, they don’t. The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board consults with its Board of Sponsors to adjust the Doomsday Clock every year. The board was first established by Albert Einstein in December 1948, with J. Robert Oppenheimer as its first chair. It currently includes nine Nobel laureates, many of whom are in physics, physiology, or medicine. The Doomsday Clock is inching closer to midnight For the two years prior, the Bulletin set the clock at 90 seconds to midnight. This was mainly due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the potential of a nuclear arms race, the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, and the climate crisis. The clock’s main purpose is not to definitively measure existential threats but rather to trigger discussions about difficult scientific topics such as climate change, according to the Bulletin. Daniel Holz, the Bulletin’s science and security board chair and professor in the department of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, in a news briefing Tuesday, said that the clock was set closer to midnight because there is now “sufficient, positive progress on the global challenges we face, including nuclear risk, climate change, biological threats and advances in disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence.” “The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization many times over,” he added. Progress in the development of disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and in space has also far outpaced regulation in those areas, Holz pointed out. As far as Holz is concerned, these dangers are exacerbated by a potent threat multiplier — “the spread of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood.” Artificial intelligence now affects the Doomsday Clock Many factors influence the doomsday clock, but the latest and perhaps most influential is the threat of AI. AI has evolved into an analog of an arms race as countries scramble to dominate the field. This has led to the start of an AI Cold War— geopolitical tensions between the United States and China focused on the competition for dominance in artificial intelligence technology. The AI Cold War goes back to 2018, when China announced its AI Development Plan aimed at global leadership by 2030. Since then, the US has hit China with waves of sanctions and bans to limit the Asian nation’s access to recent and high-performing GPUs. That fight took on a different dimension with the release of DeepSeek, China’s alternative to all the language models the US has shipped. DeepSeek has stolen the spotlight for performing on par with leading AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT while costing only $6 million to train, a fraction of the over $100 million OpenAI spends on similar models. The app’s success has raised national security concerns in the US, with many worried about data privacy and the potential for Chinese influence through AI technology. If the clock ever strikes midnight Stakeholders expect the latest development will only supercharge the AI Cold War as the US tries to reclaim its lead. The potential fallout from an unhinged pursuit of AI dominance is why the Doomsday Clock is now 89 seconds to midnight. Scientists hope the Doomsday Clock will once again start discussions that lead to peaceful resolutions. Midnight represents the moment at which people will have made the Earth uninhabitable. According to Bulletin president and CEO Rachel Bronson, the clock has never reached midnight, and she hopes it never will. “When the clock is at midnight, that means there’s been some sort of nuclear exchange or catastrophic climate change that’s wiped out humanity,” she said. “We never really want to get there, and we won’t know it when we do.” Cryptopolitan Academy: Are You Making These Web3 Resume Mistakes? - Find Out Here
