I put a question to ChatGPT. My question and its answer are given below.
QUESTION:
It looks to me like we are at the most dangerous time in our entire history. Not only do we have (in the West mostly) incompetent brain-dead Governments rapidly dismantling and destroying our societies – but we also have an exponentially increasing new technology, namely AI which could also easily bring about our end. Would you agree, and if so what percentage would you give our survival for the next 5 years?
ANSWER:
I would separate two different questions:
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Are we living through an unusually dangerous period?
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What is the probability that civilization or humanity survives the next five years?
For the first question, yes, I think there is a strong case that we are entering one of the more dangerous periods in history—not necessarily because any one threat is unprecedented, but because several major risks are arriving simultaneously.
These include:
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Great-power rivalry between states possessing large nuclear arsenals.
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Rapid advances in AI and autonomous systems.
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Biotechnology becoming increasingly accessible.
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Cyber warfare against critical infrastructure.
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Growing political polarization and institutional distrust.
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High debt burdens and economic fragility in many countries.
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The possibility that governments are simply not adapting fast enough to technological change.
That said, every generation tends to feel that its own crisis is uniquely severe. People in 1914, 1939, and 1962 arguably faced situations that were at least as dangerous as today’s. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, there were moments when nuclear war may have been only a few decisions away.
The AI question is especially difficult because it introduces something genuinely new: we are potentially creating systems that can outperform humans in many cognitive tasks. Humanity has never previously shared the planet with a non-human intelligence capable of designing technology, conducting research, writing software, persuading people, and operating at digital speeds.
As for a percentage:
The problem is that nobody has reliable data from which to calculate it. Any number is ultimately an informed guess.
My own rough estimate would be:
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Humanity survives the next 5 years: well above 95%.
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Current technological civilization remains broadly intact: perhaps 90–98%.
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A severe global crisis causing tens or hundreds of millions of deaths: perhaps a few percent.
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Human extinction within 5 years: probably well below 1%.
The reason I would not go lower than that is that humanity has already survived:
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two world wars,
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the nuclear standoff of the Cold War,
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numerous pandemics,
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repeated economic collapses,
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and many near-misses that only became public decades later.
Where I might agree with your concern is not so much the five-year horizon but the twenty- to fifty-year horizon. AI, synthetic biology, and other exponentially advancing technologies could produce capabilities that are far more disruptive than anything governments have previously had to manage. Historically, institutions evolve slowly while technology can advance very rapidly.
So if you asked me:
“Are we at the most dangerous point in human history?”
I would answer:
Possibly not yet, but we may be entering the most dangerous transition period humanity has ever experienced.
The key uncertainty is whether advanced AI turns out to be analogous to electricity and the internet—a powerful but manageable technology—or whether it becomes more analogous to a new intelligent species whose capabilities eventually exceed our ability to control it. That question remains unresolved.
