Humanity is officially one second closer to world annihilation, scientists say. The Doomsday Clock has been revealed – and it now sits at 89 seconds to midnight, one second closer than last year. It's also the closest the clock has ever been to midnight in its 78-year history, meaning we're nearer to world-ending catastrophe than ever before. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which decides where the hands are set, cited the Russia-Ukraine war, ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, the threat of nuclear war, climate change, a looming bird flu pandemic and AI arms race for the update. The Chicago-based nonprofit created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 during the Cold War tensions that followed World War II to warn the public about how close humankind was to destroying the world.

Humanity is still at a'time of unprecedented danger.'. Scientists updated the Doomsday Clock Tuesday, revealing they are keeping it at 90 seconds to midnight as in 2023, which is the theoretical point of annihilation. The unchanged clock - a symbolic timepiece showing how close the world is to ending - was accredited to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, an acceleration in the nuclear arms race and advancements of AI. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which decides where the hands are set, said it is the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. Rachel Bronson, the bulletin's president and CEO, said: 'Conflict hot spots around the world carry the threat of nuclear escalation, climate change is already causing death and destruction, and disruptive technologies like AI and biological research advance faster than their safeguards.'

In The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum discuss a disturbing hypothetical scenario. A lone actor in Nigeria, "home to a great deal of spamming and online fraud activity," tricks women and teenage girls into downloading malware that enables him to monitor and record their activity, for the purposes of blackmail. The real story involved a California man who the FBI eventually caught and sent to prison for six years, but if he had been elsewhere in the world he might have gotten away with it. Many countries, as Wittes and Blum note, "have neither the will nor the means to monitor cybercrime, prosecute offenders, or extradite suspects to the United States." Technology is, in other words, enabling criminals to target anyone anywhere and, due to democratization, increasingly at scale.

Technology evangelists dream about a future where we're all liberated from the more mundane aspects of our jobs by artificial intelligence. Other futurists go further, imagining AI will enable us to become superhuman, enhancing our intelligence, abandoning our mortal bodies, and uploading ourselves to the cloud. Paradise is all very well, although your mileage may vary on whether these scenarios are realistic or desirable. The real question is, how do we get there? Economist John Maynard Keynes notably argued in favor of active intervention when an economic crisis hits, rather than waiting for the markets to settle down to a more healthy equilibrium in the long run.

Humanity is in a precarious state and never more than a hair's breadth from being wiped out, if the hordes of Doomsday fanatics are to be believed. But while many scenarios may seem in the realm of fantasy, a new report suggests there are a number of global catastrophic risks which we could do with preparing for much better. According to the report, top of the list for 2016 are climate change-related catastrophes, natural pandemics - such as bird flu - and nuclear war. Countdown to extinction: A new report detailing the global catastrophic risks facing humanity lists nuclear war (stock image) and climate change among the top threats that could wipe out up one tenth of the world's population. Other risks which make the list for 2016 include man-made virus, failure of geo-engineering - such as adding iron to oceans to absorb atmospheric carbon - as well as the threat of catastrophic disruption from artificial intelligence. The report suggests that a person may be five times as likely to be wiped out in an extinction event as a car crash.