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I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past.
The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least...
Near term AI risk: simulated social status. Social status is a big downside to playing video games all day / abusing drugs. GPT3 and friends are probably capable of giving you believable simulated social status, far beyond what current video games provide. This could be a big theraputic boon as well as well as a threat to people's happiness and contribution to society.