Submission Statement:

>As Antarctica’s emperor penguins are increasingly threatened by the climate crisis, the flightless seabirds will receive new protections under the Endangered Species Act, or ESA.

>With global warming melting the sea ice the penguins depend on for their survival, the US Fish and Wildlife Service now categorizes the species as threatened. The federal agency lists “imperiled species as endangered or threatened regardless of their country of origin.” The announcement came more than a year after an initial proposal by the service to protect emperor penguins under the ESA.

>Emperor penguins rely on sea ice to form their breeding colonies, avoid predators in the ocean and forage for food. But as Earth’s temperature rises in relation to greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions, sea ice is at risk of disappearing. When sea ice melts or breaks apart earlier in the season than expected due to global warming, entire penguin colonies can decline or disappear.

>Parts of the Antarctic Peninsula’s sea ice have melted by more than 60% in 30 years, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. And if emperor penguins suffer and decline, it’s likely that other species within the ecosystem are also at risk due to the climate crisis. Emperor penguins forage for krill, fish and squid in the sea, but they also serve as prey for leopard seals and killer whales.

>There are about 61 emperor penguin breeding colonies along Antarctica’s coastline, which in total consist of between 270,000 to 280,000 breeding pairs (or 625,000 and 650,000 individual penguins, including juveniles), according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The bird population is currently stable, but research has suggested that the emperor penguin’s population will decrease by 26% to 47% by 2050, or drop to 185,000 or 132,500 breeding pairs, according to the service.

Submission Statement:

>Since 1990, the United Nations Development Programme has been tasked with releasing reports every few years on the state of the world. The 2021/2022 report — released earlier this month, and the first one since the Covid-19 pandemic began — is titled “Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives.”

>“The war in Ukraine reverberates throughout the world,” the report opens, “causing immense human suffering, including a cost-of-living crisis. Climate and ecological disasters threaten the world daily. It is seductively easy to discount crises as one-offs, natural to hope for a return to normal. But dousing the latest fire or booting the latest demagogue will be an unwinnable game of whack-a-mole unless we come to terms with the fact that the world is fundamentally changing. There is no going back.”

>Toby Ord, senior research fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and the author of the existential risk book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, explores this question in an essay in the latest UNDP report. He calls it the problem of “existential security”: the challenge not just of preventing each individual prospective catastrophe, but of building a world that stops rolling the dice on possible extinction.

>“To survive,” he writes in the report, “we need to achieve two things. We must first bring the current level of existential risk down — putting out the fires we already face from the threats of nuclear war and climate change. But we cannot always be fighting fires. A defining feature of existential risk is that there are no second chances — a single existential catastrophe would be our permanent undoing. So we must also create the equivalent of fire brigades and fire safety codes — making institutional changes to ensure that existential risk (including that from new technologies and developments) stays low forever.”

>“Existential security” is the state where we are mostly not facing risks in any given year, or decade, or ideally even century, that have a substantial chance of annihilating civilization. For existential security from nuclear risk, for instance, perhaps we reduce nuclear arsenals to the point where even a full nuclear exchange would not pose a risk of collapsing civilization, something the world made significant progress on as countries slashed nuclear arsenal levels after the Cold War. For existential security from pandemics, we could develop PPE that is comfortable to wear and provides approximately total protection against disease, plus a worldwide system to detect diseases early — ensuring that any catastrophic pandemic would be possible to nip in the bud and protect people from.

>The ideal, though, would be existential security from everything — not just from the knowns, but the unknowns. For example, one big worry among experts including Ord is that once we build highly capable artificial intelligences, AI will dramatically hasten the development of new technologies that imperil the world while — because of how modern AI systems are designed — it’ll be incredibly difficult to tell what it’s doing or why.

>So an ideal approach to managing existential risk doesn’t just fight today’s threats but makes policies that will prevent threats from arising in the future too.

Submission Statement:

>“We have deployed four weaponised [unmanned] machines within an operational experiment”, told Lieutenant Colonel Sjoerd Mevissen, commander of the Royal Netherlands Army's Robotics and Autonomous System. “To my knowledge, we have not seen this before in the West…the machines have been handed over for experimental use in an operational unit in a military-relevant environment. These are not simply tests on a training ground. We are under the direct eyes and ears of the Russians, and as such in a semi-operational environment.”

>The machine-gun-toting robots aren’t the first the world has ever seen. Estonia first deployed an unarmed version of THeMIS in Mali in 2019. This Russian MoD confirmed it deployed armed UGVs in Syria in 2018. Iran has also been developing its own UGVs and showed off its Heidair-1 on social media in 2019. Iran’s small beetle-like drone seems designed to roll under tanks and APCs and explode.

>Both Russia’s Uran-9 and Estonia’s THeMIS are bigger and can carry more deadly equipment. The Uran-9 is capable of carrying a 30mm 2A72 automatic cannon and four 9M120-1 Ataka anti-tank guided missiles, which makes it look like a frightening and deadly killer robot. However, early reports indicate that Russia's UGV didn’t work well in Syria and repeatedly lost connection to its controller.

>During the summer, a video of a robot dog with an assault rifle strapped to its back went viral on the internet. Earlier this month, Boston Dynamics promised it wouldn’t weaponize its brand of robot dogs. The video was creepy and Boston Dynamics’ sentiment was aimed at calming down the public, but the truth is that killer ground robots are already here and that the world’s militaries aren’t interested in strapping a gun to the back of a quadruped even if they might have other uses on a near-future battlefield.

>Gun-toting killer ground robots were always going to look like what the Dutch have deployed and what the Russian’s tested in Syria—little tanks bristling with guns and absent humans.