. . . could have told you that. Heck. the K/T Event has a distinct signature in any rock column, and its' characterization. . . in the 1980s. . . led to the TTAPS paper, better known as the "Nuclear Winter" paper. This is 35+ year-old "news". ..
I suppose that we have to figure that some may not have heard about it. Its like the endless turkey cooking tips that get repeated every year around Thanksgiving time.
But yeah, geologists and climatologists have used a lot of information stored in the earth such as how certain minerals form, radiodecay, Ice cores, and other indicators to form climate over time data with pretty fair confidence.
There are some mysteries of course, like "snowball earth" which is a hypothesis that the whole earth was covered with ice at one point, used to explain how some minerals at tropical latitudes formed that require very cold temps to form. But that's a hypothsis and a detail in the overall story.
Just pump several gigatons of sulphur into the atmosphere to counteract the warming of the carbon dioxide!
What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!
The head-in-sand argument always assumes that we have to start with gigatonnes of sulphur. Why can't we start with a much smaller amount and investigate the effect?
It's pretty easy to do this already, as sulfur aerosols belched out by volcanoes does have a cooling effect, followed by whatever energy retention occurs from the CO2 ejected at the same time.
For my money, we have to take whatever lumps that earth is going to give us at this point. It makes sense to restrict CO2 emissions, but SO2 release comes with it's own problems at most scales.
Ok. I'm a mathematician, so I think I have some degree of expertise relevant to comment when someone says that they have a mathematical proof of something. You cannot give a mathematical proof of something in the physical world.
You are of course correct. I think they are using the wrong words "mathematical proof" when the accurate term is "extensive modelling."
But that's the world we live in, where Mathematical proof sounds so smart and right, and extensive modelling probably sounds like women and men walking around on catwalks to show off clothing.
The abstract:http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/10/25/1618854114
A really quick perusal of the full paper doesn't show any particular issues, it is simply a model run to some conclusion. As always, some assumptions have to be made. As such, there is nothing outlandish or red flagging about it.
I think the tl;dr version of all this is don't put a lot of stock in articles that try to bridge popular culture and science - read the actual papers.
An AV has to be able to get around with a GPS, a map (about as detailed as you get with the nav system in your current car) and what the sensors tell it. If you can't make that work, the AVs will be limited to a rather small subset of roads and be easy to sabotage.
The present vision of millions of people travelling in unheard of safety in their AVs is surely doomed. The vehicles are too vulnerable. As much as we focus on the roadrage type activies that occasionally happen, driving on highways takes a lot of cooperation between people. Root level cooperation as it were.
So the cooperation has to extend to the autonomous vehicles as well. So we're going to turn over control of our vehicles to a system with the track record that exists now? Even if the in-car control system were somehow completely immune, you know that they will have internet access. I can see the headlines and stories:
50 thousand people were killed today when the Chevy Patriotism line of cars were hacked and their fully autonomous vehicles drove off the nearest cliff. General Motors and congress send thoughts and prayers.
I 100% agree about the fact that while in theory, V2V could be great, but in reality, we all know it would be buggy/security hole ridden/hackable as hell. You would absolutely see people spoofing other vehicles and sending bad information which will lead to accidents and fatalities.
If they are all AVs, there will have to be a lot of communication. I think that the future of AVs is going to be a niche, where small numbers co-exist among a vast majority of assisted vehicles. Think buses and taxis. Maybe limos.
With lane assist, augmented braking, and anti-tailgating radar, you can achieve probably 99 percent of the safety promised by fully Autonomous Vehicles.
It would also eliminate some of the impossible to avoid problems of having to program the routes, and what happens if you decide to stop off somewhere or just decide partway through the drive to take a different route. I don't know how many people drive the exact same route home and back every day. It's like having the good parts of the technologies without the pain in the ass parts. And if I decide to have a nice ride in the country to relax, I don't have tp program the route. Because I don't know the route, and I don't feel like spending my time giving voice commands.
With assisted technology, I can have the very best of both worlds.
I don't know that I liked the idea of V2V communication anyway. It sounds cool in theory, but the more complex we make all these systems the more chances there are for people to manipulate things to cause harm. If self-driving cars depend on such technology, then messing with it could cause as many problems as it solves. I'd prefer that each self-driving car be able to do its job without inter-car communication, which seems doable given the way that tech is evolving today.
In the scenario where all cars are autonomous, they will have to talk to each other, otherwise gridlock will result. Its not much of an issue when there is one car among non AVs, but the constant communication has to be there when all or most of them drive themselves.
We will likely find both better ways to extract ore, and better ways to build batteries.
That was pretty much my reaction, too. When a scarce resource becomes expensive (because of, well, scarcity), we manage to find ways of using less in a product, finding new sources, or finding alternative materials to get the job done. As just one example, look at all the ingenious ways Nazi Germany managed to get around their limited supply of war materials: oil, rubber, steel, etc.
This is more or less an axiom of economic theory. One would think the same magical-free-handers that say electric cars will never displace ICE cars would understand this applies to batteries, too.
It's pretty easily explainable by nostalgia and inertia.
I sort of understand it, as I have a visceral reaction when I walk into a garage and smell the combination of smells that bring back all my pleasant gearhead memories. But somehow these people became stuck in their desire for no change.
The strange thing is now many Slashdotters now fall into that category. The number of people here who spew hate on Tesla and any power source not coming from coal or nuclear is a little disturbing. Especially when they side with folks who seem to think that you can't purify the element Nickle.
I'd use the "L" word, but that summons old you know who.
Neither nickel nor cobalt is needed for lithium batteries. Tesla batteries contain both, but the Nissan Leaf uses manganese instead, and there are billions of tonnes of manganese reserves.
We will likely find both better ways to extract ore, and better ways to build batteries. Just ask Paul Ehrlich about betting against human ingenuity.
The whole story reminds me of the "Prius Problem" when detractors were claiming that Prius batteries were going to die at 40 K miles, and that you were going to lose any money you saved in gasoline to replace that battery pack. It turned out to be really wishful thinking be the petrofuel crowd.
These aren't minerals, but elements.
The ore which they elements may be extracted from are minerals - several different kinds, none of which are mentioned in TFS.
The elements themselves are not rare. It''s just a matter of paying for the extraction. It won't make batteries hard to find, just expensive.
The cited element Nickle, is easily purifiable. After the initial Extraction, they use a procedure called the Mond process. They cite 99.99 percent purity.
I couldn't get much further on the cited page in the article because of them blocking my ad-blocker, but it looks like petrofuel car site, which does give me an idea about where they are coming from.
But she still lost the electoral college while recieving more votes. Face it, unless you are a Russian Troll, You'd be calling for armed insurrection if a Democrat won th eoffice in the same manner.
You mean Manafort's actions that had nothing to do with Trump' s campaign. Yeah, I think I'll keep laughing as your political world crashes and burns.
Hold on there AC - Appaently you know the entire case against Manifort inluding the all of the evidence taken in the raid on his apartment. So Are you in the FBI, or one of the Prosecuting attorneys working for Meuller? Anyhow I'm certain Manafort and the FBI would love to talk to ypou at length about how you know everything about the case. Leaker perhaps?
Or are you one of the "Absolutely zero evidence" people?
Anyone who gets their information from the Bookface, or sucking at the media's (left or right) teat, deserves what they get.
What would you suggest as an alternative? If you rule out the media and social media, how do you get your news?
I can agree with you on social media, but what is a better source than professional journalists?
I dunno. I get my news from ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, BBC and Breitbart. I can see some folks getting twitchy about the first 5 sources, and others freaking about the last one.
Fox News is a comedy channel, so not on my source list.
I get no news from Facebook at all ever. Of course I'm only there because I have to be on the FB dungheap. Guess that's my cross to bear.
Some people ask why such an eclectic mix of news sources?
There is a lot of news happening in the world. No one group can cover it all. Just the decision on what news to cover will show inherent bias. It cannot be helped. So exposing myself to several sources gives not only more information, but also a great way to expose the biases of any one outlet.
Whatever you do, don't blame the (heinously unpopular for years & years before the election) losing candidate for losing the election. Blame Canada instead!
To be precise, Crooked Hillary lost the electoral college.
So did the Russians do better by spending $50K on Facebook, or getting their cut on the $12M that Hillary and the DNC spent on the Trumped-up Dossier?
The issue of course, is based on who's ox is being gored.Many ofthe same people who say "so what", regarding the Kremlin's activity would be very upset if North Korea were doing the same to their Dear Leader Trump.
Or Hillary anything.
The question needed asked is beyond the situation of two flawed candidates. The question is why an adversarial state would put effort into electing one over the other.
As well, the adversarial efforts are running out of steam. Its hard to respond to Paul Manafort's Ukraine and Russian connections with "But crooked Hillary's emails!" and have people not laugh at you. Its becoming very hard to deny connections when Mueller has already obtained the first conviction, in one George Papadopoulos.
And let us not forget that old Crooked Hillary didn't start the Dossiers you have such a hardon about - it was a Republican who prefers to not be known. And let's not forget that it is apparently just fine with you about Trump's people meeting with Russians to get dirt on old Crooked Hillary. But that's probably "different".
So just keep on whining about old Crooked Hillary. It now provides much amusement, Tovarisch.
I'll disagree with you on that one. The purpose of war is for one group to force their will on another (and the converse, to prevent another group from forcing their will on them.) That might be: to take their stuff, to take their land, to control their politics, or whatever. Killing people just happens to be a very good way to do that: if you kill all the other people who can fight back, you can impose your will without opposition.
But killing people isn't the objective, it is merely a tool to accomplish the objective. If you could accomplish the objective with a better tool-- well, then the people with the better tool would impose their will on the people without the better tool.
And yet, even aside from wars, the prisons are full of people who kill other people.
And almost every animal ever on the planet has gone extinct. I suspect we shall do the same, only for our crewed up sense, we'll be crying tears of joy when it happens.
We are a tribal species, and our psychology practically requires an "other".
This is true, but here's a hypothetical: 'the other' doesn't necessarily have to be other humans. I mean, the age-old sci-fi theme is humans uniting as a species against an external threat once we realize we're not that different compared to aliens, but the external uniting force does not have to be aliens either.
I'm in disagreement. Humans have a core competency of aggression, and this aggression is mainly toward other humans. The sci-fi trope is merely wishful thinking.
And if the "enemy" is climate, we won't unite to fight it. We'll kill other humans in a fight over dwindling resources and useable land. It will be a lot more like Mad Max than The 4th of July.
But I agree with you that adding robots into the battlefield is not progress, but for different reasons I think. When you take away the human cost of war, you take away the political cost as well.
Bingo! I have long said that the concept of robot warfare isn't going to work in the end because we aren't killing people. Humas have a deep seated need to kill other humans.
Right now, it is asymmetrical. We un the US are using robots that kill some other groups of people who aren't anywhere near the technology to create their own. So the deathlust is satisfied.
But as technologically advanced nations create their own warrior robots, my best guess is that robot versus robot warfare is going to be boring, once we get past the Battlebots style novelty.
Sure but that's not just humans, that's just the very nature of existence. The whole universe and certainly life itself is built around conflicting forces to some degree or another.
You're basically arguing that reality is harsh, you're right. Our biggest achievement will be resisting the very nature of existence if we manage it.
Not all species are as infected with our desire to kill others of our own species. There are some examples of interspecies warfare, but with humans, it is a core competency.
The Future of War should be an absence of it. Greed will never allow that to happen.
We pretend replacing humans with bots on a 21st century battlefield is "progress". It's not. We've won a battle, but we're still waging war for profits sake.
Greed is only one part. More deep seated is that humans simply love to kill other humans. We love to define "the other" and then kill it.
This drive does not respond to rational thinking, it laughs at logic, and it has become linked to our survival instinct. The irony is that it might cause us to gleefully destroy ourselves. Our lizard brain is still in control while our modern brain allows us to create the weapons that will do it.
The only actual scenario I can see where we won't make ourselves extinct is if enough nations procure robots, and we can fight each other for the greed portion of warfare, and somehow that will tamp down our inherent love of making people dead.
Could make for some awesome episodes of BattleBots.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . could have told you that. Heck. the K/T Event has a distinct signature in any rock column, and its' characterization. . . in the 1980s. . . led to the TTAPS paper, better known as the "Nuclear Winter" paper. This is 35+ year-old "news". . .
I suppose that we have to figure that some may not have heard about it. Its like the endless turkey cooking tips that get repeated every year around Thanksgiving time.
But yeah, geologists and climatologists have used a lot of information stored in the earth such as how certain minerals form, radiodecay, Ice cores, and other indicators to form climate over time data with pretty fair confidence.
There are some mysteries of course, like "snowball earth" which is a hypothesis that the whole earth was covered with ice at one point, used to explain how some minerals at tropical latitudes formed that require very cold temps to form. But that's a hypothsis and a detail in the overall story.
Just pump several gigatons of sulphur into the atmosphere to counteract the warming of the carbon dioxide!
What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!
The head-in-sand argument always assumes that we have to start with gigatonnes of sulphur. Why can't we start with a much smaller amount and investigate the effect?
It's pretty easy to do this already, as sulfur aerosols belched out by volcanoes does have a cooling effect, followed by whatever energy retention occurs from the CO2 ejected at the same time.
For my money, we have to take whatever lumps that earth is going to give us at this point. It makes sense to restrict CO2 emissions, but SO2 release comes with it's own problems at most scales.
Just pump several gigatons of sulphur into the atmosphere to counteract the warming of the carbon dioxide!
What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!
Of course, that is very temporary effect anyhow, as the sulfur aerosols will precipitate out as sulfuric acid rain. Yikes!
Ok. I'm a mathematician, so I think I have some degree of expertise relevant to comment when someone says that they have a mathematical proof of something. You cannot give a mathematical proof of something in the physical world.
You are of course correct. I think they are using the wrong words "mathematical proof" when the accurate term is "extensive modelling."
But that's the world we live in, where Mathematical proof sounds so smart and right, and extensive modelling probably sounds like women and men walking around on catwalks to show off clothing.
The abstract :http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/10/25/1618854114
The full text http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
A really quick perusal of the full paper doesn't show any particular issues, it is simply a model run to some conclusion. As always, some assumptions have to be made. As such, there is nothing outlandish or red flagging about it.
I think the tl;dr version of all this is don't put a lot of stock in articles that try to bridge popular culture and science - read the actual papers.
Then the idea is doomed from the start.
An AV has to be able to get around with a GPS, a map (about as detailed as you get with the nav system in your current car) and what the sensors tell it. If you can't make that work, the AVs will be limited to a rather small subset of roads and be easy to sabotage.
The present vision of millions of people travelling in unheard of safety in their AVs is surely doomed. The vehicles are too vulnerable. As much as we focus on the roadrage type activies that occasionally happen, driving on highways takes a lot of cooperation between people. Root level cooperation as it were.
So the cooperation has to extend to the autonomous vehicles as well. So we're going to turn over control of our vehicles to a system with the track record that exists now? Even if the in-car control system were somehow completely immune, you know that they will have internet access. I can see the headlines and stories:
50 thousand people were killed today when the Chevy Patriotism line of cars were hacked and their fully autonomous vehicles drove off the nearest cliff. General Motors and congress send thoughts and prayers.
I 100% agree about the fact that while in theory, V2V could be great, but in reality, we all know it would be buggy/security hole ridden/hackable as hell. You would absolutely see people spoofing other vehicles and sending bad information which will lead to accidents and fatalities.
If they are all AVs, there will have to be a lot of communication. I think that the future of AVs is going to be a niche, where small numbers co-exist among a vast majority of assisted vehicles. Think buses and taxis. Maybe limos.
With lane assist, augmented braking, and anti-tailgating radar, you can achieve probably 99 percent of the safety promised by fully Autonomous Vehicles. It would also eliminate some of the impossible to avoid problems of having to program the routes, and what happens if you decide to stop off somewhere or just decide partway through the drive to take a different route. I don't know how many people drive the exact same route home and back every day. It's like having the good parts of the technologies without the pain in the ass parts. And if I decide to have a nice ride in the country to relax, I don't have tp program the route. Because I don't know the route, and I don't feel like spending my time giving voice commands.
With assisted technology, I can have the very best of both worlds.
I don't know that I liked the idea of V2V communication anyway. It sounds cool in theory, but the more complex we make all these systems the more chances there are for people to manipulate things to cause harm. If self-driving cars depend on such technology, then messing with it could cause as many problems as it solves. I'd prefer that each self-driving car be able to do its job without inter-car communication, which seems doable given the way that tech is evolving today.
In the scenario where all cars are autonomous, they will have to talk to each other, otherwise gridlock will result. Its not much of an issue when there is one car among non AVs, but the constant communication has to be there when all or most of them drive themselves.
Using the court system as a stalling tactic instead of righting a wrong. Yer right up there with Patent Trolls AT&T.
I believe his point was that we're not going to run short on supply anytime soon; what we'll run out of is cheap supply.
Probably shouldn't be titled as "We may not have enough Minerals" and "seismic effects".
If his point was that we're running out of cheap supplies, it might have made more sense to say just that.
It's actually simpler to write this one off as lying for oil and having the lie serve some folks confirmation bias.
That was pretty much my reaction, too. When a scarce resource becomes expensive (because of, well, scarcity), we manage to find ways of using less in a product, finding new sources, or finding alternative materials to get the job done. As just one example, look at all the ingenious ways Nazi Germany managed to get around their limited supply of war materials: oil, rubber, steel, etc.
This is more or less an axiom of economic theory. One would think the same magical-free-handers that say electric cars will never displace ICE cars would understand this applies to batteries, too.
It's pretty easily explainable by nostalgia and inertia.
I sort of understand it, as I have a visceral reaction when I walk into a garage and smell the combination of smells that bring back all my pleasant gearhead memories. But somehow these people became stuck in their desire for no change.
The strange thing is now many Slashdotters now fall into that category. The number of people here who spew hate on Tesla and any power source not coming from coal or nuclear is a little disturbing. Especially when they side with folks who seem to think that you can't purify the element Nickle.
I'd use the "L" word, but that summons old you know who.
Neither nickel nor cobalt is needed for lithium batteries. Tesla batteries contain both, but the Nissan Leaf uses manganese instead, and there are billions of tonnes of manganese reserves.
We will likely find both better ways to extract ore, and better ways to build batteries. Just ask Paul Ehrlich about betting against human ingenuity.
The whole story reminds me of the "Prius Problem" when detractors were claiming that Prius batteries were going to die at 40 K miles, and that you were going to lose any money you saved in gasoline to replace that battery pack. It turned out to be really wishful thinking be the petrofuel crowd.
Batteries can last, and elements can be purified.
These aren't minerals, but elements. The ore which they elements may be extracted from are minerals - several different kinds, none of which are mentioned in TFS.
The elements themselves are not rare. It''s just a matter of paying for the extraction. It won't make batteries hard to find, just expensive.
The cited element Nickle, is easily purifiable. After the initial Extraction, they use a procedure called the Mond process. They cite 99.99 percent purity.
http://nickel145.blogspot.com/...
I couldn't get much further on the cited page in the article because of them blocking my ad-blocker, but it looks like petrofuel car site, which does give me an idea about where they are coming from.
"EV's" have a larger environmental footprint, than gas powered vehicles.
You are going to need to provide an accurate citation for that.
To be precise, Hillary conceded defeat.
But she still lost the electoral college while recieving more votes. Face it, unless you are a Russian Troll, You'd be calling for armed insurrection if a Democrat won th eoffice in the same manner.
You mean Manafort's actions that had nothing to do with Trump' s campaign. Yeah, I think I'll keep laughing as your political world crashes and burns.
Hold on there AC - Appaently you know the entire case against Manifort inluding the all of the evidence taken in the raid on his apartment. So Are you in the FBI, or one of the Prosecuting attorneys working for Meuller? Anyhow I'm certain Manafort and the FBI would love to talk to ypou at length about how you know everything about the case. Leaker perhaps?
Or are you one of the "Absolutely zero evidence" people?
But the that's none of my business. I hope someone loses a shitload of money when Google does this. That would be pretty entertaining.
Anyone who gets their information from the Bookface, or sucking at the media's (left or right) teat, deserves what they get.
What would you suggest as an alternative? If you rule out the media and social media, how do you get your news?
I can agree with you on social media, but what is a better source than professional journalists?
I dunno. I get my news from ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, BBC and Breitbart. I can see some folks getting twitchy about the first 5 sources, and others freaking about the last one.
Fox News is a comedy channel, so not on my source list. I get no news from Facebook at all ever. Of course I'm only there because I have to be on the FB dungheap. Guess that's my cross to bear.
Some people ask why such an eclectic mix of news sources?
There is a lot of news happening in the world. No one group can cover it all. Just the decision on what news to cover will show inherent bias. It cannot be helped. So exposing myself to several sources gives not only more information, but also a great way to expose the biases of any one outlet.
Whatever you do, don't blame the (heinously unpopular for years & years before the election) losing candidate for losing the election. Blame Canada instead!
To be precise, Crooked Hillary lost the electoral college.
So did the Russians do better by spending $50K on Facebook, or getting their cut on the $12M that Hillary and the DNC spent on the Trumped-up Dossier?
The issue of course, is based on who's ox is being gored.Many ofthe same people who say "so what", regarding the Kremlin's activity would be very upset if North Korea were doing the same to their Dear Leader Trump.
Or Hillary anything.
The question needed asked is beyond the situation of two flawed candidates. The question is why an adversarial state would put effort into electing one over the other.
As well, the adversarial efforts are running out of steam. Its hard to respond to Paul Manafort's Ukraine and Russian connections with "But crooked Hillary's emails!" and have people not laugh at you. Its becoming very hard to deny connections when Mueller has already obtained the first conviction, in one George Papadopoulos.
And let us not forget that old Crooked Hillary didn't start the Dossiers you have such a hardon about - it was a Republican who prefers to not be known. And let's not forget that it is apparently just fine with you about Trump's people meeting with Russians to get dirt on old Crooked Hillary. But that's probably "different". So just keep on whining about old Crooked Hillary. It now provides much amusement, Tovarisch.
I'll disagree with you on that one. The purpose of war is for one group to force their will on another (and the converse, to prevent another group from forcing their will on them.) That might be: to take their stuff, to take their land, to control their politics, or whatever. Killing people just happens to be a very good way to do that: if you kill all the other people who can fight back, you can impose your will without opposition.
But killing people isn't the objective, it is merely a tool to accomplish the objective. If you could accomplish the objective with a better tool-- well, then the people with the better tool would impose their will on the people without the better tool.
And yet, even aside from wars, the prisons are full of people who kill other people.
Evolution in action.
And almost every animal ever on the planet has gone extinct. I suspect we shall do the same, only for our crewed up sense, we'll be crying tears of joy when it happens.
This is true, but here's a hypothetical: 'the other' doesn't necessarily have to be other humans. I mean, the age-old sci-fi theme is humans uniting as a species against an external threat once we realize we're not that different compared to aliens, but the external uniting force does not have to be aliens either.
I'm in disagreement. Humans have a core competency of aggression, and this aggression is mainly toward other humans. The sci-fi trope is merely wishful thinking.
And if the "enemy" is climate, we won't unite to fight it. We'll kill other humans in a fight over dwindling resources and useable land. It will be a lot more like Mad Max than The 4th of July.
But I agree with you that adding robots into the battlefield is not progress, but for different reasons I think. When you take away the human cost of war, you take away the political cost as well.
Bingo! I have long said that the concept of robot warfare isn't going to work in the end because we aren't killing people. Humas have a deep seated need to kill other humans.
Right now, it is asymmetrical. We un the US are using robots that kill some other groups of people who aren't anywhere near the technology to create their own. So the deathlust is satisfied.
But as technologically advanced nations create their own warrior robots, my best guess is that robot versus robot warfare is going to be boring, once we get past the Battlebots style novelty.
Sure but that's not just humans, that's just the very nature of existence. The whole universe and certainly life itself is built around conflicting forces to some degree or another.
You're basically arguing that reality is harsh, you're right. Our biggest achievement will be resisting the very nature of existence if we manage it.
Not all species are as infected with our desire to kill others of our own species. There are some examples of interspecies warfare, but with humans, it is a core competency.
The Future of War should be an absence of it. Greed will never allow that to happen.
We pretend replacing humans with bots on a 21st century battlefield is "progress". It's not. We've won a battle, but we're still waging war for profits sake.
Greed is only one part. More deep seated is that humans simply love to kill other humans. We love to define "the other" and then kill it.
This drive does not respond to rational thinking, it laughs at logic, and it has become linked to our survival instinct. The irony is that it might cause us to gleefully destroy ourselves. Our lizard brain is still in control while our modern brain allows us to create the weapons that will do it.
The only actual scenario I can see where we won't make ourselves extinct is if enough nations procure robots, and we can fight each other for the greed portion of warfare, and somehow that will tamp down our inherent love of making people dead.
Could make for some awesome episodes of BattleBots.