We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction

[XemaSab]

Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.

Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.

Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.

Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that existential risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of present suffering. Can you explain why?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/

[OKIsItJustMe]

1. Well, on average maybe

Some of us may be overestimating the risk. (Hopefully, I’m one of them.)

[MrSlayer]

2. This is news?

Humans will be the shortest lived dominant species the planet has ever had. We're to stupid to survive.

[saras]

3. My estimate is exactly 100% chance of extinction. You mean that's too low?

[Dead_Parrot]

6. We're gonna fuck up so bad, our parents will never have existed.

[saras]

7. Yeah, we tried that back in the sixties. It worked, too, until we turned into parents ourselves...

I wrote a song for my humor class last quarter, but it wasn't very funny...

Mercury spread in the hills by the ton, sewage we dump in the water
Medicine washed down the drain in our waste medicates more than it oughta
We're sucking the fresh water out of the ground, and squirtin' foul solvent brews in
The tap is on fire and the water turned yellow and the cows all aborted again

I like the Bomb, the Bomb is sweet. Leave the art, but microwave the meat
I like the Bomb, the Bomb's okay. We'll scramble all the world's DNA
We'll take the ball home, no one else can play.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Good summary

Sadly.

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. Tom Lehrer beat you to it

Pollution:

We Will All Go Together When We Go

The Wild West is Where I Want To Be

[GliderGuider]

10. I've been a huge fan of Lehrer for over 50 years.

I even used one of his songs as a Weapon of Self Destruction.

In 1963 at age 12 I sang "The Elements" in front of all 30 schoolmates at a very rural one-room country school - accompanying myself on the ukelele. It was instant social suicide...

[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 1px #000000"]There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium,
<gasp>
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
<gasp>
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.
I could never figure out why they weren't as thrilled as I was...

[OKIsItJustMe]

11. Years ago, my brother found himself in a pub in England

For some reason, the occupants assumed, that since he was an American, and could sing, he would know The Elements by heart, and requested he sing it.

As it turned out, although he did not believe it, their unwarranted assumption was correct.

[Newest Reality]

4. I think that

our technology is outstripping our ability to deal with it properly, considering the speed of innovation versus the rate of adaptation possible.

Just look at the more conservative, (and currently dominant) approaches to business, finance, work, education, values, etc. It is possible that the cultural and psycho-emotional lag is a big concern concerning our survival as as species.

However, change happens and it is accelerating and perhaps it will teach us something about complexity versus simplicity and how happiness is actually achieved.

[GliderGuider]

5. Funny you should mention that.

One of the books on my bedside table right now is "Tragedy in Mouse Utopia" by the Canadian ecologist Jack Vallentyne.

The book starts from a discussion of John Calhoun's famous mouse experiment at NIMH in 1968. Four breeding pairs were introduced to a safe, closed environment with plenty of food, water and fresh air, well-arranged sleeping and social quarters, no predators and no disease - a true mouse utopia. They were left to breed at will.

Over 560 days the colony grew from 8 to 2200 mice. It then entered an inexorable downward curve that ended 1000 days later - not with a stable lower number of mice, but with the extinction of the entire colony.

The culprit seems to have been behavioural changes brought on by the marginal overcrowding. There was always plenty of space available, but the level of involuntary interaction may have gotten too high and overwhelmed their social instincts.

The implications it raises for our own future are disturbing, given that we're seeing a similar situation with regard to human populations, intense urbanization and declining species-wide birth rates.

The message that I take from it is that the recent drop in our birth rates may not herald the happy days of Stages 3 and 4 of the Demographic Transition Model , but may instead be the precursor to a behaviour-mediated decline in our numbers, potentially ending at 0. But that's just me...