Wiping Out Humanity?! An Introduction to Existential Risks

If you are depressed or in a gloomy mood, you might want to bookmark this article and come back to it when you are in a better mood, because it isn't on a very uplifting topic. But existential risks, also known as global catastrophic risks, are definitely important enough to be worth discussing even if they make us feel blue.

What are existential risks?

The best introductory paper on this topic was written by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher who heads the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He defines the problem this way:

"[A risk] where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential."

Image: Public domain

This is in contrast with risks that might be terminal locally (such as genocide), or global in scope but endurable (such as the thinning of the ozone layer -- a really bad thing, but in most scenarios it wouldn't lead to the complete destruction of intelligent life on Earth...).

Existential risks are basically the worst thing that can happen to humanity: They get everybody, everywhere, and potentially keep intelligent life from rising up again. It's the worst kind of catastrophe that we can think of.

Photo: NASA, public domain.

Examples of Existential Risks

This short introduction to existential risks won't go in depth into any specific risk, but here's a short list of potential ones: The deliberate misuse of nanotechnology (we're not at that stage yet, but it's probable that we'll have molecular manufacturing technology at some point), a nuclear holocaust (it almost happened a few times in the past 50 years, so it's not theoretical risk), a badly programmed superintelligence (which is why we shouldn't just research strong AI, but make sure it is Friendly AI), a genetically engineered biological agent (Bostrom writes: " it may become possible for a tyrant, terrorist, or lunatic to create a doomsday virus, an organism that combines long latency with high virulence and mortality") or a naturally occurring disease that is more contagious and deadly than what we've seen so far, runaway global warming (we're not talking only a few degrees here... It would have to get really bad), asteroid or comet impact (a really big one traveling fast could explode with the energy of hundreds or thousands of nuclear bombs), etc.

What Can We Do About It?

Because existential risks are global and terminal, we don't get a second chance. This means that we have to think about them differently:

Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach - see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience - is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs (moral and economic) of such actions. -- Nick Bostrom

In a way, trying to prevent these events from happening is the ultimate in sustainability, because if we don't avoid these, nothing else that we do will have been truly sustainable. Everybody you love will be dead, all of humanity's art and science will be lost, and countless people will never get a chance to be born.

The two main approaches try to prevent and mitigate the impact of these events. Some are preventable, so for example, we can work on reducing the number and power of nuclear weapons, we can track asteroids and calculate their trajectories to try to learn long enough in advance if one could hit the Earth, etc. With some other risks, we can't really do prevention, but we can make humanity more resilient. For example, in the short term, we can try to have a faster reaction time when there's a pandemic, and in the longer term, we should start thinking about becoming a multi-planet species (not having all our eggs in the same basket would definitely be wise, if not easy to do, at least at our technological level).

But most importantly, we must study these risks.

There's a flaw in human nature that makes us not very good long-term thinkers. Because global catastrophic events don't happen very often (if they did, we wouldn't be here right now), we tend to think that they can't happen. The bad news is that very few people are thinking about this problem and trying to come up with solutions and raise awareness. The good news is that because few people are working on this, your contribution can make a much bigger difference than on a problem that already has millions of people giving money and thinking about it.

Here are some ways to get informed and to support those who are working on protecting humanity (if we don't understand them well, we can't know how likely they are and what the best solutions are), and working on solutions and mitigation strategies.

I know it sounds like science-fiction, but it's not because something has appeared in fiction that it can't happen in real-life. Lots of things were first explored in the imagination of writers and movie-makers and then actually happened...

-First you can read Bostrom's introductory paper: Existential Risks - Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards

-If you want to dig deeper, Bostrom edited and anthology about existential risks: Global Catastrophic Risks (Amazon link)

-If you want to make a donation, there's the SIAI which is working on raising awareness about existential risks and on developing Friendly AI theory. There's the http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/about">Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, and the Lifeboat Foundation working on mitigating existential risks and making humanity more robust.