The Lancet: nuclear war and malicious artificial intelligence top threats to human health

The news currently comes from a single source (The Lancet Commission on 21st-century global threats to health, picked up by Euronews Italia); no independent confirmation available.

A working group convened around The Lancet has drawn up a list of 17 main risks to humanity’s health over the coming decades. First and second place go to two scenarios distinct in nature but united by the scale of potential harm: a nuclear conflict and a harmful use of artificial intelligence technologies. The initiative is named Lancet Commission on 21st-century global threats to health and brings together 37 experts from different fields — public health, economics, international security and technology — a sign of an approach that is not confined to classic epidemiology alone.

To make such heterogeneous threats comparable, from wars to technological risks, the authors adopted a single unit of measurement: disability-adjusted life years, an indicator known by the acronym DALY, already used in public health to combine into a single figure the mortality and disability produced by an event. The calculation covers a very long time span, from 2025 to 2100, and extends to 204 countries and territories, thus offering a global picture rather than one limited to individual geographic areas.

This is a comparative assessment on a multi-decade scale produced by a commission of experts, not an experimental study on an isolated event or a limited population: the distinction is relevant for correctly placing the scope of the work.

The journal’s editor-in-chief, Richard Horton, summed up the point of the operation as follows:

“A radical conceptual shift in how we think about future threats” — Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet

Nuclear war and malicious artificial intelligence thus open a list of 17 entries built on a span of three quarters of a century and on a sample of more than two hundred countries and territories, with the DALY as the common unit of comparison between risks of very different natures.