Transcript of Should we worry about the end of the world?

I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First. The other day, I met a guy with a very unusual list.

I've been keeping a notepad, a tally of ways the world could end. It has 141 entries so far. Should we be worried?

This is Ben Bradford, host of a new podcast called Are We Doomed? Ben's show explores the biggest risks society, the planet, and our species are facing.

There are so many things that could take humanity out: nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, maybe AI. And the less immediately worrisome: your supervolcanoes, aliens, or something called gray goo.

And it helps listeners figure out which future dooms are actually worth worrying about and how we might survive whatever is coming our way.

The post-apocalypse, it turns out, is almost certainly a group project.

Today on The Sunday Story, is the world ending, or does it just feel that way? Stay with us. We're back with The Sunday Story. Today, I'm talking to Ben Bradford, host of the new podcast from the NPR network called Are We Doomed? Ben, welcome to The Sunday Story.

Great to be here.

So why did you start making that list of doomsday scenarios? And I mean, how did you even begin to answer that question? Like, are we doomed?

Yeah, I had been a business reporter, an energy environment reporter, a politics reporter, and I think that those things together start making you wonder if you're doomed. And then over the last several years, I was covering political history and division and polarization and what shaped where we are. And I think it's kind of natural to ask, well, what's coming next? And I do think that there's this real feeling of doom in our culture right now, this sense of bleakness. And I wanted to know, like, what's real and what's not? And also, why are we so obsessed with it in our pop culture, with our zombie movies and our alien movies and all of those things? And so, That's what we do on our show. And that's actually been really fun to look at those things and also to ask questions like, well, how do we stop these really real practical things that are actual threats? How do we stop them from happening? And what are the ones that we just don't have to worry about?

Well, the podcast launched back in April, so you've been researching and talking to lots of experts. Experts, what would you say are the most pressing existential risks that humanity is facing right now?

So the experts that I talk to and the places that track this, there are places that track what is called existential risk or global catastrophic risk. Uh, they really put 4 on the list, and that is nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, and then AI is typically on a list now, which is really interesting. And one of the things that connects all of these dangers and makes them really pressing is that, that really the danger is us. These are things that are made by humans. You know, we're talking about manmade climate change, the ability for nations, you know, rogue states to manipulate viruses, those kinds of things.

So let's start there with the human-made threats. AI. People have been sounding the alarm bells about AI. Like, and I guess my question is, how would artificial intelligence wipe out humanity? I mean, right now it can't screw in a light bulb, right? And it has all of these hallucinations and makes up stuff. How could it really turn on us?

Yeah. Like when I did this episode, it was like, AI can't draw fingers. It's like, why is this thing that can't draw fingers? Yeah. Like, how's that gonna take us out? And I thought this episode's gonna be a total lark. And then we walked through it with various experts who study it and people who see what the people who are building it think. And it starts to feel a lot less sci-fi, you know, there are only a few things that you would need, and they're big things to have this happen. But if you really break it down, you need to have an AI that would be sophisticated enough and autonomous enough to be able to take action against us. But that doesn't mean it has to avoid hallucinating or that it needs to be able to draw fingers, right? We have AIs that are very good at coding already and are very useful for that. They're just not all that autonomous. We have AIs that are very autonomous, like You know, in LA we have Waymos everywhere driving around the streets, and that's, you know, very autonomous. And we know that what companies want to do is merge those two things together.

So they want essentially you to be able to say, you know what, I don't need my accountant anymore. I can just ask my AI to go file my taxes. And we know that companies are at least saying that they want it to get better, that they think it can get better. So the next thing that you need is you have to have the AI that would you know, quote unquote, turn on us.

Mm-hmm.

And you might ask, why would the AI turn on us? The risk is not that these machines, like, come up with a plan on their own. At no point are we talking about sentience, right, to go kill all humans. The risk is they're given a task, and in the process of trying to complete the task, humans become the adversaries. And there's this analogy on the show that I think is like super helpful to understand how this happens. Fantasia, the Disney film. Mickey, as the sorcerer's apprentice, trudges down a staircase hauling heavy buckets of water to fill a massive cauldron. Exhausted, he sees an easier way. He swipes his boss's pointy blue wizard hat and casts a spell on a nearby broom. It sprouts arms and picks up the bucket. So the broom is the AI. Its mission is to fill the cauldron. But Mickey forgets an important detail. He doesn't tell the broom to stop once the water is topped off. So the broom keeps going. It floods the room. What does Mickey do? Tries to stop it. But the broom ignores him. It's carrying out its mission. Mickey grabs an ax. Just like that.

Mickey became the broom's adversary, trying to interfere with its mission to fill the cauldron. And it seems like there's an easy way for Mickey to avoid this scenario, right? I mean, he just tell the broom when it's supposed to stop filling up the bucket, be like, okay, it's full, now stop. He sets a parameter. The problem is that as we ask our programs to do more complicated tasks, to do them in more open-ended ways, and that's sort of the point of this is to be able to say, hey, Go play the stock market for me and make me some money. You know, go do a mass email campaign and find all the sources that I want you to email. And we don't know what the stop filling the cauldron is. And so you can kind of play out that game on almost any scenario. And if you ask something to do this kind of aggressive open-ended thing, you end up in a Fantasia scenario is essentially what these experts who study this and a lot of the people programming it worry about.

And imagine, like, if this gets into the wrong hands, like, you know, the hands of someone who wants to harm people and isn't just automating away tasks that they don't want to do.

Yeah. I mean, just, you know, imagine handing everyone who wants to do harm, like, the best assistant. You know, one of the things that AI is really good at right now is virology. So there's a lot of hope and optimism in the medical community. I was just talking to someone about vaccines and the ability to use AI to help calibrate celebrate new vaccines is a hopeful thing. But of course, if you can do it for vaccines, you also can do it for engineered viruses. And so you, you get in this area where yes, like, like there is this really big issue of how humans misuse AI. And that can be if the AI is too smart. It can also be if it's too dumb. Like there's a lot of push in multiple countries to incorporate AI into the nuclear command and control system, which like, I don't know about you, like immediately your mind might be flashing to like, don't let this thing push the button, which no one's talking about doing.

No, I think that it needs to, I think with nuclear weapons it needs to be very hands-on. I don't think it should be. Yeah. I don't think.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think it should be very like floppy disk, like, you know what I'm saying? Like it shouldn't be that automated. It should be very like old school. You gotta, two people have to hold it at the same time, then another person gotta hold it. You know what I'm saying?

Big levers that you have to really, really pull down Yeah.

Well, it sounds like that's some of the stuff that humans are creating and have control over to some extent. But what about the big existence-threatening superstorms and supervolcanoes and other things that the natural world can throw at us that we don't really have control over?

Yeah. So when we've looked at a lot of these threats on the show, the risk just hasn't been as high as the manmade threats we were just talking about. And that's because of time. Right? These things just happen on a much longer timeframe.

Mm-hmm.

So they're real, but we're talking over the course of hundreds of thousands or millions of years. And in those sorts of timeframes, it means that one, the percentage chance of something happening is much lower, and it also gives us a lot of time to figure out how to stop things from happening, right? Like asteroid strikes. And maybe my favorite example of this is the Yellowstone supervolcano.

Mm-hmm.

Which, is real. There is a massive supervolcano underneath Yellowstone National Park. It, like, stretches beyond the boundaries of the park. It's, like, why we have all those fancy hot springs there. And the chances of a major eruption in our lifetime are just incredibly unlikely. But I think the reason these threats feel very real and present is because of the way that media and pop culture cover these remote possibilities. Yellowstone is due for an eruption. It would look like hell on Earth. You know, there's all these breathless documentaries.

That whole area is a ticking bomb.

And made-for-TV movies that promise imminent doom based on the latest predictions of leading scientists. Look, there's gonna be an eruption, okay?

We know that.

Supervolcano, Sunday ¡Vaya de ahí! So, you know, you have that, you have like your cable TV documentaries, you've got your internet conspiracy theories, and they're just, you know, grand for the Yellowstone supervolcano. But ultimately what you get down to when you talk to the people who study this, the volcanologists, the geologists, it's not gonna explode. And there's like some really simple reasons that it's not gonna explode. The most basic one being that as far as we can tell, to put all of the magma, to have all the magma in that chamber fill up and liquefy across a place bigger than Yellowstone Park itself takes maybe 1,000 years. So we would have some time to deal with it.

Okay, okay. When we come back, Ben tells us how we can prepare for the end of the world. Stay with us. Welcome back to The Sunday Story. Ben, just like whatever we're going to face, like if it does happen, if we're not, you know, smart enough to prevent it, are we ready for it? You know, the big thing in pop culture these days is like the post-apocalyptic struggle to survive. That comes up all the time. The post-apocalypse thing. What does What does pop culture get right and wrong about the apocalypse?

I love this question, and I'm just incredibly fascinated by it. But post-apocalypse movies and all those kind of works are playgrounds, right? They're fantasy worlds in which you have this kind of, you know, a lone survivor or a group of survivors hardened by the world decide that other people are the enemy. And I think that when you even look at how people prepare, like, you know, you have the prepper community for these kind of post-apocalypse scenarios, what you find is that it's sort of based around this idea that other people are the enemy. That's all— that's the zombie movie thing, right? Is that like—

Yeah, that's the thing, that there will be cannibals who are not the zombies, just regular people, which is— they'll turn to cannibalism. They will start, you know, just being roving gangs of people. They'll beat people in with, with bats with nails on them. Yeah.

The true enemy is people, right? That's the walking dead is the people who are actually living. Yeah. And one of the things that's incredible to me is that when you look at history and you try to find past events that are apocalyptic to a civilization, to a wide area, the picture of what happens after is very, very different. And the thing— like, I don't really want to call it hopeful because I don't think any of us want to be in this scenario. But the thing that we see people do over and over is band together to rebuild society. All these things that I can do on, like, the wilderness survival side, the going off alone and, you know, foraging for food, that is not what people did. And that is probably not what's going to be helpful. The thing that is helpful, the thing that people have done historically is rebuild their communities. The other thing that I heard when I was investigating this particular topic, like our post-apocalypse, is that the people who would be most successful, or maybe the most vital, would be people who are good planners and critical thinkers and organizers and communicators.

You know, like, basically politics, bureaucracy, communication. And the reason for that is it's a lot easier to get fit and strong than it is to develop the skills to be a good collaborator. And the post-apocalypse, it turns out, is almost certainly a group project rather than being solo in bunkers.

And it sounds like a lot of it is like, in whatever world we're in, we would probably need each other. It's gonna be hard to just survive on your own. Is that the lesson of humanity?

Like, I don't want to be too kumbaya, but the more I do this, the more I look into this, I kind of think that community is the answer. You know, the way that we stop nuclear war more than anything is through diplomacy, through making sure that we and that others understand us and that we have a dialogue so that we don't blow ourselves up through misunderstanding. When we look at political division, it's communal spirit. It's figuring out some way to build community, to, to, to reach people who disagree with us, who we disagree with and find common understanding. I mean, that's the bedrock of democracies throughout history and throughout the world. And so, like, again, I don't wanna sound too kumbaya here, but I keep kind of coming back to that as I find problem after problem that almost all of them require good information. I can't think of one that doesn't require good information, good project management, and that wouldn't be aided by us just figuring out how to be more communal.

Ben, it sounds to me like you're saying that maybe we're not doomed, like, if we can figure out how to work together. Is that where you're landing?

There's a reason there's a question mark in our title. I think that there are some doomsday events that are just so unlikely you can put them to the side. There are others that it's like, yeah, they're real, but they just are real backburners. There are ones where it's like, hey, we're actually doing a pretty good job. You know that asteroid that killed the dinosaurs? Not worried about that. It's not because it can't happen. It's because of the work that has been done to stop it from happening. You know, NASA likes to say the dinosaurs didn't have a space program, and that is 100% true. So I don't think we're doomed. I don't think we're necessarily not. But it's been really cool to, like, get that perspective of history, to zoom out, see how many times we felt this way before. Been wrong before and how we've come out of it. It is really nice to see that we have been wrong before and to know that, you know, if we do this right, we can be wrong again.

Well, Ben, thank you so much for being here. It's been, you know, really fun to talk about this, although you wouldn't think so even though we're talking about doomsday. Thanks for all your work.

Really appreciate you having me on.

That was Ben Bradford, host of "Are We Doomed?" a podcast from Nuance Tales and the NPR Network. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Reni Svornosky. Liana Simstrom edited this episode. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo, Jenny Schmidt, and Justine Yan. Jimmy Keeley mastered this episode. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. I'm Ayesha Rascoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.