Judged by number of war-related deaths per capita, we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. The last major conflict was the Second Congo War in the ‘90s, which killed around 5.4 million people and involved a bunch of African nations. If you want to talk about scary wars, try reading about that one.
I realize this seems almost unrealistically upbeat, and most people don’t want to believe it given what we see in the media every day. Note that I’m not arguing against increasing global instability, which will become worse if Russia triumphs in Ukraine (whatever form that could take) or the US continues to turn its back on its allies.
Disinformation and AI fakery via social media are probably the scariest things to me on your list. Twitter is now a garbage dump for this stuff, but the good news is that it is hemorrhaging both users and money.
I don’t see magnitude of mortality as necessarily a good indicator for the prevalence of violence or “peace”.
Let’s say, for the sake of the thought experiment, that every weekday, a small swarm of killer drones is released in your city. These drones reliably, randomly target and kill 250 commuters per weekday.
That’s only 62,500 people per year. Pretty mild. Certainly nowhere near as bad as Covid, maybe about as bad as a bad flu year, right? Heart disease kills about 700,000 people a year, so it’s not even 10% of that. Barely registers on the dashboard.
I realize this seems almost unrealistically upbeat, and most people don’t want to believe it given what we see in the media every day. Note that I’m not arguing against increasing global instability, which will become worse if Russia triumphs in Ukraine (whatever form that could take) or the US continues to turn its back on its allies.
Disinformation and AI fakery via social media are probably the scariest things to me on your list. Twitter is now a garbage dump for this stuff, but the good news is that it is hemorrhaging both users and money.