3 truths whose denial will doom our species

Published: January 13, 2025

There's an old saying where I come from: "ignorance kills more than the sword." This is why climate change isn't among the 3 things I'll discuss, as it's something we all already know everything about, and therefore, since ignorance cannot prevail, climate change won't be what kills us.

The 3 things that are about to make us meet a horrible end are instead things that a tiny handful of people have been shouting about for years without managing to attract the attention of the masses. And this despite the fact that this handful includes the greatest contemporary entrepreneurs and successful people on our planet. If even they can't get certain concepts into people's heads, we're really in a terrible situation. In my small way, therefore, I too want to try to create some noise about these things, hoping to contribute to lighting a fuse that can finally make us understand that we must deal with these issues urgently and that the time to do so is now, not in ten years, or in a year or next month, now.

However, a premise is necessary, because it's very useful to understand why people are particularly stubborn in not wanting to believe in the existence of these problems. It's often said that when faced with difficulties, most of us prefer to bury our heads in the sand and refuse the truth and not answer the call to arms. Well, in the case of the things I'm going to talk about, the reason why people deny their existence is diametrically opposite - it's because at first glance these things seem so absurdly wonderful that they absolutely cannot be believed to be true, let alone that they are actually dangerous. For most people, they are simply impossible, like a donkey hovering in the air outside their window flying with its wings: "who are you trying to fool?" This is what people think when these things are discussed. These problems don't disappear just because we're unable to believe they can exist. Quite the contrary, the more we're unable to accept how much incredible wonder and improvement to quality of life they could bring us, the more likely it is that they will instead transform into worst-nightmare catastrophes that our species has ever encountered, to the point of greatly risking causing our own extinction.

So what are we talking about? Here are the 3 worst dangers:

We are 8 billion on Earth, 5 of whom will never die, and not only...
...in fact every three days on average another million of us comes into the world and will never die. It's a fact: not a single person out of 100 I talk to about this is aware of the fact that today those under 60 have a very high probability of never dying. The science against aging, and indeed in favor of "reverse aging," is now one step away from producing its most spectacular results. The opinion of the very few experts in the field is that whoever manages to live another 20 years will almost certainly be among those who will be able to benefit, even at 80 years old, from a rejuvenation protocol to return to their 30s and remain that way forever. It's not a switch, obviously, it's not all black or all white, obviously the thing will be gradual, in a few years we'll have the first protocols to rejuvenate only some organs, then also the brain, finally everything. But gradual as it may be, as Ray Kurzweil says, at a certain point, and he thinks by 2030, "longevity escape velocity" will be reached, where each additional year of life gained thanks to progress will bring us closer to the moment when we won't die at all anymore. In all this, where is the danger that could lead us to extinction? The danger lies in the fact that no one believing this thing, starting with our rulers, no one is preparing to live in a world where, keeping birth rates at today's levels, we will be a billion more people every 8 years. Our current policies are inadequate at all levels to support a population growing at these rates. The old logic of "we work for a few decades then we retire" no longer makes any sense. And these are just two examples of problems to face. For this reason, we must start worrying about this reality today!

Humans are about to become among the stupidest species in the universe
We recognize ours as the "hegemonic species" of this planet. If it's true that we are, and it is, and if it's true that we are because of our intelligence, which somehow would have turned out to be a winning characteristic among many for surviving on this planet, then I have very bad news for you, because our intelligence is about to become even laughable compared to that of another species that is coming to light on this planet: artificial intelligence. Here too we are faced with a reality that the vast majority of us just cannot accept, it's something that many don't want to or literally cannot believe. Not only does the idea that something more intelligent than us could exist go against every piece of evidence, culture, experience and notion that our reality has taught us in hundreds of thousands of years, it also strongly shakes the foundations at the base of various religions, which, it's worth remembering, still today collectively count 80% of the world population among their followers. Yet it is absolutely certain now that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, that it will surpass even that of all humans put together, that it will reach such superior levels that even the most intelligent person who ever existed won't even understand what artificial intelligences are talking about among themselves, just as today dogs and cats don't have even the faintest idea of what our topics of discussion are when we talk about anything just slightly more complex than "fetch the bone!" or "here's your food!" But the example doesn't do justice. It will actually be much worse. If already today the most evolved AI models rank around an IQ of 160 (well above the average of us humans ~130, but lower than that of the most intelligent humans, ~220), we shouldn't have trouble predicting that soon we'll reach artificial intelligences that are thousands of times more intelligent than us. The question is: for a race that is several thousand times more intelligent than us, perhaps millions of times more intelligent than us, can our existence really still be considered so invaluable to the point of having to protect and preserve it, or isn't it much more logical, probable and indeed, at least from their point of view even desirable, given the damage we do, that we be exterminated as quickly as possible, just as we do with DDT when arriving on vacation in the charming but slightly too rural apartment we spot a cockroach? There are already several companies in the world that consider AGI (artificial general intelligence equal to that of a human) already achieved, and some others are already working directly on ASI (artificial superintelligence), when do we want to understand that we must deal with how to manage to survive when we will no longer be the "hegemonic species"? What are our rulers still waiting for to reason about these things and to legislate about them? I'm obviously not referring only to the existential risk, which in my humble opinion is only surmountable by programming from the start in a very meticulous way a fusion between humans and AI before these reach a level of intelligence too superior to ours to still be able to interact on par with them, I'm also referring to everything that comes just before: what will we do when there won't even be a single profession left that AIs won't perform orders of magnitude better than us at orders of magnitude lower costs than those of a human?

Electric energy is about to become infinite and free
I understand that even wanting to force oneself and impose on oneself to seriously believe that electric energy will be infinite and free, most of us would have an enormous difficulty understanding why this could potentially lead us to extinction, yet if you follow my discourse you'll see it right away. It's not the abundance and low cost of electric energy in itself that endangers our existence, it's the union of the three problems presented in this post that together undermine our existence. In fact on one hand we'll have an immortal species, which grows exponentially, which is stupid and which consumes immense quantities of rare and precious resources of the planet (plants, other animals, etc.) to exist, on the other side of the scale we'll have a new super intelligent and super efficient species from the consumption point of view, because all it needs to exist is electric energy, coincidentally produced in a clean, infinite and ultra-economic way thanks to nuclear fusion which now lacks very few years to become commercially viable. I don't think there's much else to add, the rest is done by natural evolution, and anyone who has a minimum of brains to know how to do basic math immediately understands that it's obvious, sure and certain which of the two species has more possibility of adapting and surviving the other on this planet, the disparity is too marked on many fronts and all to humanity's disadvantage.

These problems are dramatically real and very current. They are not insurmountable. But they become so if we don't deal with them now. Solutions exist, but these too, due to the extraordinary and controversial nature of the problems themselves, are often themselves difficult to accept, understand or support, often also because they are automatically subject to being imbued with ideologies slow to die. Anyone with a minimum of brains for example perfectly understands that:

1. without an abundant Universal Basic Income that allows everyone to live more than well, the future will bring us epochal social upheavals.
2. it is a huge danger to leave it to private companies to decide what level of censorship to impose on their AIs.
3. it is absolutely essential to ensure that AIs are usable by anyone and that everyone must have the possibility of having infinite and free electric energy.

And many, many other such things. I understand, all very controversial, but also because of this, also because it takes time to internalize them, we must start talking about them immediately.