When asked how the world would end, the results are also intriguing: 37 percent of British respondents thought a nuclear war would be the cause of the world ending, followed by 13 percent who answered climate change, 8 percent who provided an unspecified cause, 5 percent who said “worldwide revolution,” and 3 percent who said … zombies.
If we turn to the Oxford folk, we discover that their causes, in rank order, were:
Artificial intelligence (0-10% chance)
Unspecified cause (0.1%)
Three-way tie between climate change, synthetic biology and nanotechnology (0.01%).
So what is the big takeaway here? The public might be more pessimistic about the world coming to an end for any reason, but the experts are far more pessimistic about technology causing the world to come to an end.
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