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In addition to well-known threats such as nuclear holocaust, the prospects of radically transforming technologies like nanotech systems and machine intelligence present us with unprecedented opportunities and risks. Our future, and whether we will have a future at all, may well be determined by how we deal with these challenges.
- Nuclear Weapons: A History of Near Misses
- How Big Is The Risk Posed by Climate Change?
- What New Technologies Might Be as Dangerous as Nuclear Weapons?
- What’s The Total Risk of Human Extinction If We Add Everything Together?
- Why These Risks Are Some of The Most Neglected Global Issues
- What Can Be Done About These Risks?
- Want to Help Reduce Existential Threats?
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Today we all have North Korea’s nuclear programme on our minds, but current events are just one chapter in a long saga of near misses. We came close to nuclear war several times during the Cuban Missile Crisis alone.12In one incident, the Americans resolved that if one of their spy planes were shot down, they would immediately invade Cuba without a...
In 2015, President Obama said in his State of the Union addressthat “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” Climate change is certainly a major risk to civilisation. The most likely outcome is 2–4 degrees of warming,18which would be bad, but survivable for our species. However, some estimatesgive a 10% chanc...
The invention of nuclear weapons led to the anti-nuclear movement just a couple decades later in the 1960s, and the environmentalist movement soon adopted the cause of fighting climate change. What’s less appreciated is that new technologies will present further catastrophic risks. This is why we need a movement that is concerned with safeguarding ...
Many experts who study these issues estimate that the total chance of human extinction in the next century is between 1 and 20%. In our podcast episode with Will MacAskillwe discuss why he puts the risk of extinction this century at around 1%. And in his 2020 book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Toby Ord gives his guess ...
Here is how much money per year goes into some important causes:26 As you can see, we spend a vast amount of resources on R&D to develop even more powerful technology. We also expend a lot in a (possibly misguided) attempt to improve our lives by buying luxury goods. Far less is spent mitigating catastrophic risks from climate change. Welfare spend...
We’ve covered the scale and neglectedness of these issues, but what about the third element of our framework, solvability? It’s less certain that we can make progress on these issues than more conventional areas like global health. It’s much easier to measure our impact on health (at least in the short-run) and we have decades of evidence on what w...
Our generation can either help cause the end of everything, or navigate humanity through its most dangerous period, and become one of the most important generations in history. We could be the generation that makes it possible to reach an amazing, flourishing world, or that puts everything at risk. As people who want to help the world, this is wher...
Top recommendations
1. Read the case for focusing on future generations. 2. Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications 3. Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity’s potential futures
This article is part of our advanced series. See the full series, or keep reading: 1. Read more 2. Read more 3. Read more
Sep 24, 2023 · To begin with, I revised Ord’s definition of existential risk and restructured Bostrom’s map of risks at large, considering a wide range of scenarios in which the human potential for civilization development might collapse.
- Makoto Usami
- usami.makoto.2r@kyoto-u.ac.jp
• Existential risk is a concept that can focus long-term global efforts and sustainability concerns. • The biggest existential risks are anthropogenic and related to potential future technologies.
Nov 23, 2015 · Many prominent researchers regard Bostrom’s basic views as implausible, or as a distraction from the near-term benefits and moral dilemmas posed by the technology—not least because A.I. systems...
Feb 16, 2019 · Existential risk has been defined by Nick Bostrom (J Evol Technol 9 (1):1–31, 2002) as “one where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential”.
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Mar 27, 2013 · Some small existential risks can be mitigated today directly (e.g. asteroids) or indirectly (by building resilience and reserves to increase survivability in a range of extreme scenarios) but it is more important to build capacity to improve humanity’s ability to deal with the larger existential risks that will arise later in this century.
