In the opening scene of Threads, a young couple called Jimmy and Ruth are parked up on a hillside overlooking Sheffield in northern England, under bleak gray skies. The car radio crackles as Jimmy changes through the stations. Partial sentences from a news report are audible as he impatiently fiddles with the dial.
The afternoon’s soccer results start pouring out. Later, at the pub, Jimmy is drinking a beer with his friend Bob as a television news report details the Soviet Union moving nuclear warheads to an Iranian base, and NATO considering its response to the crisis. Jimmy notes to Bob that "it's getting serious," but is met with a dismissive reply: "Well there's nowt we can do about it, is there?
Might as well enjoy ourselves while we can.” This is a theme throughout the early part of Barry Hines’ harrowing 1984 film. Ordinary people going about their lives, distracted by the usual chores and trivialities, as a geopolitical horror story unfolds over their lives, until it reaches its climax literally above their heads as a nuclear airburst. It was a warning about the very real existential risk to human civilization of nuclear war between Western allies and the Soviet Union.
By the irradiated end, our modern society had regressed into a medieval state of drudgery and survival in a long nuclear winter. The unforgiving starkness of Threads is hard to capture in written word. You’ll have to watch it, but probably not before bed.
The nuclear threat still exists for us, of course, though it has eased somewhat since the worst days of the Cold War, notwithstanding Russia’s recent belligerence in Ukraine, and even against NATO allies. Instead, the greatest and most urgent threat posed to human civilization is now—if the apparent Cassandras of frontier artificial intelligence are right—a recursive superintelligence that escapes human control. Yet we’re behaving much like the people of Sheffield in the first half of Threads, and it isn’t for want of hearing the news.
After a summer in which AI models from both OpenAI and Anthropic went rogue during testing, a 27-year-old British researcher named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic this month, warning that the people building AI believe it “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Days later, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, wrote that AI was starting to help build its own successors, and called on the industry to slow down. OpenAI’s Sam Altman quickly agreed, as did Elon Musk. The public has certainly noticed that something’s up.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
