Doom
2012
I see a few imminent dooms facing the human race:
- Artificial Intelligence. Computers get better than us at everything, and we become irrelevant.
They'd keep humans in zoos.
- Genetic Engineering. The tools for building artificial organisms will become cheap enough
that teenagers can build a virus in their garage that wipes out the human race.
- Nuclear War. Poison the entire planet.
Dooms through natural disasters are less likely. I expect a human-made doom in the next 100 years,
but the last significant natural doom was 65 million years ago. There was an ice age 13 thousand
years ago, but I doubt that would reduce our population by even an order of magnitude.
If we have to be doomed, I favor doom through AI, because it would
leave intelligence in the universe. So buy Intel and Google and
Stratasys stocks rather than Illumina or Life Technologies or Pfizer.