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The only significant existential risks for which this isn’t true are “simulation gets shut down” (although on some versions of this hypothesis the shutdown would be prompted by our activities [27]); the catch-all hypotheses (which include both types of scenarios); asteroid or comet impact (which is a very low probability risk); and ...
The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (est. 2011) is a US-based non-profit, non-partisan think tank founded by Seth Baum and Tony Barrett. GCRI does research and policy work across various risks, including artificial intelligence, nuclear war, climate change, and asteroid impacts. [67]
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- 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?
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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...
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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
Anthropogenic – hu-man-caused – risks are a much newer phenomenon. Technological progress can give us the tools to im-prove society and to reduce existential risk, for exam-ple by providing the means to deflect large asteroids. However, technologies can also create new risks: with the invention of nuclear weapons, humanity gained
Nov 23, 2015 · Nick Bostrom, a philosopher focussed on A.I. risks, says, “The very long-term future of humanity may be relatively easy to predict.” Illustration by Todd St. John
Aug 23, 2019 · 3 Incidentally, Bostrom appears to overlook these issues in one section of his 2013 paper about existential risks. In defending his maxipok rule, Bostrom argues against the Rawlsian ‘maximin’ rule, which states that, under ignorance, one should pick the action with the best worst-case outcome.
Feb 16, 2019 · The large number of existential risks identified in recent years by the experts can be divided into two macro categories: endogenous or “anthropogenic” risks, that is, risks produced by human civilization during its development, and exogenous risks, independent of our will, arising from both terrestrial and extraterrestrial natural phenomena.
- Roberto Paura
- r.paura@futureinstitute.it
- 2019
