Lancet panel: AI and nuclear war could threaten humanity

According to a new assessment by a commission convened by The Lancet on global health threats in the 21st century, nuclear war and malicious use of artificial intelligence could, over the next 75 years, create a plausible pathway to human extinction by 2100. The commission identified 17 major threats to human health and said there are potential responses for each.

The report places those two risks alongside a broader catalogue of dangers. It highlights how interconnected the problems are and argues that decisions made by today’s leaders will shape the health and wellbeing of future generations.

How the threats were ranked

Researchers ranked threats by estimating the healthy life years that could be lost through disease, disability or early death, using the disability-adjusted life years metric, known as DALYs. Calculations drew on current trends and considered both optimistic and pessimistic scenarios.

The commission says a nuclear conflict could loft enough particles into the upper atmosphere to block sunlight and trigger widespread famine. It also warns that malicious applications of AI could include efforts to design biological weapons. Experts involved in the assessment judged the probability of these extinction scenarios to be low, but not zero.

Beyond those two risks, the commission lists 15 other threats that together could erase more than one billion healthy life years. They include air pollution, antimicrobial resistance, child undernutrition, the climate crisis, conventional armed conflict, reductions in foreign aid, high alcohol consumption, high blood pressure, income inequality, low education levels, natural pandemics, obesity, mental health problems, smoking and unhealthy ageing.

To appear on the list, a threat had to have the potential to cause widespread harm to human health and also have plausible measures available to address it. The report stresses that the dominant threats vary by region. In high-income settings, noncommunicable diseases such as obesity and mental health disorders make up a larger share of the burden. In low-income settings, factors such as low education play a larger role.

The commission estimates that a collapse or severe reduction in international health aid could, by 2100, result in up to 1.5 billion lost healthy life years, with nearly 70 percent of that burden falling on sub-Saharan Africa, a region also grappling with child undernutrition.