About this topic
Summary Climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, asteroid impacts, rogue AI--each has been claimed to pose an existential risk. Loosely, an existential risk is a risk of human extinction or of a similarly severe loss of future moral value.
Key works For an extended discussion of particular existential risks and their likelihood, see Ord's The Precipice. For a case in favour of mitigating existential risks, see Bostrom's "Existential risk prevention as global priority". For discussion of how best to define existential risks, see Greaves' "Concepts of existential catastrophe.
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  1. (1 other version)Probabilities, Methodologies and the Evidence Base in Existential Risk Assessments.Thomas Rowe & Simon Beard - manuscript
    This paper examines and evaluates a range of methodologies that have been proposed for making useful claims about the probability of phenomena that would contribute to existential risk. Section One provides a brief discussion of the nature of such claims, the contexts in which they tend to be made and the kinds of probability that they can contain. Section Two provides an overview of the methodologies that have been developed to arrive at these probabilities and assesses their advantages and disadvantages. (...)
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  2. Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils.David Thorstad - manuscript
    When our choice affects some other person and the outcome is unknown, it has been argued that we should defer to their risk attitude, if known, or else default to use of a risk avoidant risk function. This, in turn, has been claimed to require the use of a risk avoidant risk function when making decisions that primarily affect future people, and to decrease the desirability of efforts to prevent human extinction, owing to the significant risks associated with continued human (...)
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  3. The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.Nick Bostrom - 2018
    Scientific and technological progress might change people’s capabilities or incentives in ways that would destabilize civilization. For example, advances in DIY biohacking tools might make it easy for anybody with basic training in biology to kill millions; novel military technologies could trigger arms races in which whoever strikes first has a decisive advantage; or some economically advantageous process may be invented that produces disastrous negative global externalities that are hard to regulate. This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable world: (...)
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  4. Is Extinction Risk Mitigation Uniquely Cost-Effective? Not in Standard Population Models.Gustav Alexandrie & Maya Eden - forthcoming - In Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves & David Thorstad (eds.), Essays on Longtermism. Oxford University Press.
    What socially beneficial causes should philanthropists prioritize if they give equal ethical weight to the welfare of current and future generations? Many have argued that, because human extinction would result in a permanent loss of all future generations, extinction risk mitigation should be the top priority given this impartial stance. Using standard models of population dynamics, we challenge this conclusion. We first introduce a theoretical framework for quantifying undiscounted cost-effectiveness over the long term. We then show that standard population models (...)
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  5. 'Everything you always wanted to know about Atomic Warfare but were afraid to ask': Nuclear Strategy in the Ukraine War era.Demetrius Floudas - forthcoming - Cambridge Existential Risk Initiative Termly Lectures; Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.
    The ongoing conflict in Ukraine constitutes a poignant reminder of the enduring relevance and potential devastation associated with nuclear weapons. For decades, the possibility of such catastrophic conflict has not seemed so imminent as in the current world affairs. -/- This contribution presents a comprehensive analysis of nuclear strategy for the 21st century. By examining the evolving geostrategic landscape the talk illuminates key concepts such as nuclear posture, credible deterrence, first & second strike capabilities, flexible response, EMP , variable yield, (...)
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  6. Discounting, Buck-Passing, and Existential Risk Mitigation: The Case of Space Colonization.Joseph Gottlieb - forthcoming - Space Policy.
    Large-scale, self-sufficient space colonization is a plausible means of efficiently reducing existential risks and ensuring our long-term survival. But humanity is by and large myopic, and as an intergenerational global public good, existential risk reduction is systematically undervalued, hampered by intergenerational discounting. This paper explores how these issues apply to space colonization, arguing that the motivational and psychological barriers to space colonization are a special—and especially strong—case of a more general problem. The upshot is not that large-scale, self-sufficient space colonization (...)
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  7. The Fragile World Hypothesis: Complexity, Fragility, and Systemic Existential Risk.David Manheim - forthcoming - Futures.
    The possibility of social and technological collapse has been the focus of science fiction tropes for decades, but more recent focus has been on specific sources of existential and global catastrophic risk. Because these scenarios are simple to understand and envision, they receive more attention than risks due to complex interplay of failures, or risks that cannot be clearly specified. In this paper, we discuss the possibility that complexity of a certain type leads to fragility which can function as a (...)
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  8. Existential Risk and Equal Political Liberty.J. Joseph Porter & Adam F. Gibbons - forthcoming - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3.
    Rawls famously argues that the parties in the original position would agree upon the two principles of justice. Among other things, these principles guarantee equal political liberty—that is, democracy—as a requirement of justice. We argue on the contrary that the parties have reason to reject this requirement. As we show, by Rawls’ own lights, the parties would be greatly concerned to mitigate existential risk. But it is doubtful whether democracy always minimizes such risk. Indeed, no one currently knows which political (...)
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  9. How Much Should Governments Pay to Prevent Catastrophes? Longtermism's Limited Role.Carl Shulman & Elliott Thornley - forthcoming - In Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves & David Thorstad (eds.), Essays on Longtermism. Oxford University Press.
    Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. In this paper, we show that the case for preventing catastrophe does not depend on longtermism. (...)
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  10. Longtermism and social risk-taking.H. Orri Stefánsson - forthcoming - In Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves & David Thorstad (eds.), Essays on Longtermism. Oxford University Press.
    A social planner who evaluates risky public policies in light of the other risks with which their society will be faced should judge favourably some such policies even though they would deem them too risky when considered in isolation. I suggest that a longtermist would—or at least should—evaluate risky polices in light of their prediction about future risks; hence, longtermism supports social risk-taking. I consider two formal versions of this argument, discuss the conditions needed for the argument to be valid, (...)
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  11. Deep Uncertainty and Incommensurability: General Cautions about Precaution.Rush T. Stewart - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    The precautionary principle is invoked in a number of important personal and policy decision contexts. Peterson shows that certain ways of making the principle precise are inconsistent with other criteria of decision-making. Some object that the results do not apply to cases of deep uncertainty or value incommensurability which are alleged to be in the principle’s wheelhouse. First, I show that Peterson’s impossibility results can be generalized considerably to cover cases of both deep uncertainty and incommensurability. Second, I contrast an (...)
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  12. Existential Risk, Astronomical Waste, and the Reasonableness of a Pure Time Preference for Well-Being.S. J. Beard & Patrick Kaczmarek - 2024 - The Monist 107 (2):157-175.
    In this paper, we argue that our moral concern for future well-being should reduce over time due to important practical considerations about how humans interact with spacetime. After surveying several of these considerations (around equality, special duties, existential contingency, and overlapping moral concern) we develop a set of core principles that can both explain their moral significance and highlight why this is inherently bound up with our relationship with spacetime. These relate to the equitable distribution of (1) moral concern in (...)
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  13. The argument for near-term human disempowerment through AI.Leonard Dung - 2024 - AI and Society:1-14.
    Many researchers and intellectuals warn about extreme risks from artificial intelligence. However, these warnings typically came without systematic arguments in support. This paper provides an argument that AI will lead to the permanent disempowerment of humanity, e.g. human extinction, by 2100. It rests on four substantive premises which it motivates and defends: first, the speed of advances in AI capability, as well as the capability level current systems have already reached, suggest that it is practically possible to build AI systems (...)
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  14. Why prevent human extinction?James Fanciullo - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (2):650-662.
    Many of us think human extinction would be a very bad thing, and that we have moral reasons to prevent it. But there is disagreement over what would make extinction so bad, and thus over what grounds these moral reasons. Recently, several theorists have argued that our reasons to prevent extinction stem not just from the value of the welfare of future lives, but also from certain additional values relating to the existence of humanity itself (for example, humanity’s “final” value, (...)
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  15. Concepts of Existential Catastrophe.Hilary Greaves - 2024 - The Monist 107 (2):109-129.
    The notion of existential catastrophe is increasingly appealed to in discussion of risk management around emerging technologies, but it is not completely clear what this notion amounts to. Here, I provide an opinionated survey of the space of plausibly useful definitions of existential catastrophe. Inter alia, I discuss: whether to define existential catastrophe in ex post or ex ante terms, whether an ex ante definition should be in terms of loss of expected value or loss of potential, and what kind (...)
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  16. Risk, Non-Identity, and Extinction.Kacper Kowalczyk & Nikhil Venkatesh - 2024 - The Monist 107 (2):146–156.
    This paper examines a recent argument in favour of strong precautionary action—possibly including working to hasten human extinction—on the basis of a decision-theoretic view that accommodates the risk-attitudes of all affected while giving more weight to the more risk-averse attitudes. First, we dispute the need to take into account other people’s attitudes towards risk at all. Second we argue that a version of the non-identity problem undermines the case for doing so in the context of future people. Lastly, we suggest (...)
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  17. “Emergent Abilities,” AI, and Biosecurity: Conceptual Ambiguity, Stability, and Policy.Alex John London - 2024 - Disincentivizing Bioweapons: Theory and Policy Approaches.
    Recent claims that artificial intelligence (AI) systems demonstrate “emergent abilities” have fueled excitement but also fear grounded in the prospect that such systems may enable a wider range of parties to make unprecedented advances in areas that include the development of chemical or biological weapons. Ambiguity surrounding the term “emergent abilities” has added avoidable uncertainty to a topic that has the potential to destabilize the strategic landscape, including the perception of key parties about the viability of nonproliferation efforts. To avert (...)
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  18. (1 other version)Respect for others' risk attitudes and the long‐run future.Andreas L. Mogensen - 2024 - Noûs 58 (4):1017-1031.
    When our choice affects some other person and the outcome is unknown, it has been argued that we should defer to their risk attitude, if known, or else default to use of a risk‐avoidant risk function. This, in turn, has been claimed to require the use of a risk‐avoidant risk function when making decisions that primarily affect future people, and to decrease the desirability of efforts to prevent human extinction, owing to the significant risks associated with continued human survival. I (...)
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  19. Should longtermists recommend hastening extinction rather than delaying it?Richard Pettigrew - 2024 - The Monist 107 (2):130-145.
    Longtermism is the view that the most urgent global priorities, and those to which we should devote the largest portion of our resources, are those that focus on (i) ensuring a long future for humanity, and perhaps sentient or intelligent life more generally, and (ii) improving the quality of the lives that inhabit that long future. While it is by no means the only one, the argument most commonly given for this conclusion is that these interventions have greater expected goodness (...)
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  20. Hope in an Illiberal Age? [REVIEW]Mark R. Reiff - 2024 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 2024 (1):1-9.
    In this commentary on Darrel Moellendorf’s Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change & Global Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), I discuss his use of the precautionary principle, whether his hope for climate-friendly ‘green growth’ is realistic given the tendency for inequality to accelerate as it gets higher, and what I call his assumption of a liberal baseline. That is, I worry that the audience to whom the book is addressed are those who already accept the environmental and economic values to which (...)
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  21. Life-Suspending Technologies, Cryonics, and Catastrophic Risks.Andrea Sauchelli - 2024 - Science and Engineering Ethics 30 (37):1-16.
    I defend the claim that life-suspending technologies can constitute a catastrophic and existential security factor for risks structurally similar to those related to climate change. The gist of the argument is that, under certain conditions, life-suspending technologies such as cryonics can provide self-interested actors with incentives to efficiently tackle such risks—in particular, they provide reasons to overcome certain manifestations of generational egoism, a risk factor of several catastrophic and existential risks. Provided we have reasons to decrease catastrophic and existential risks (...)
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  22. (1 other version)Economic inequality and the long-term future.Andreas T. Schmidt & Daan Juijn - 2024 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 23 (1):67-99.
    Why, if at all, should we object to economic inequality? Some central arguments – the argument from decreasing marginal utility for example – invoke instrumental reasons and object to inequality because of its effects. Such instrumental arguments, however, often concern only the static effects of inequality and neglect its intertemporal consequences. In this article, we address this striking gap and investigate income inequality's intertemporal consequences, including its potential effects on humanity's (very) long-term future. Following recent arguments around future generations and (...)
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  23. (1 other version)Non-Additive Axiologies in Large Worlds.Christian Tarsney & Teruji Thomas - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say 'no'. This distinction appears to be practically important: among other things, additive axiologies generally assign great importance to large changes in population size, and therefore tend to strongly prioritize the long-term survival of humanity over (...)
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  24. Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk.David Thorstad - 2024 - Ethics 135 (1):122-150.
    Longtermists have recently argued that it is overwhelmingly important to do what we can to mitigate existential risks to humanity. I consider three mistakes that are often made in calculating the value of existential risk mitigation. I show how correcting these mistakes pushes the value of existential risk mitigation substantially below leading estimates, potentially low enough to threaten the normative case for existential risk mitigation. I use this discussion to draw four positive lessons for the study of existential risk. -/- (...)
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  25. Protecting Future Generations by Enhancing Current Generations.Parker Crutchfield - 2023 - In Fabrice Jotterand & Marcello Ienca (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Human Enhancement. Routledge.
    It is plausible that current generations owe something to future generations. One possibility is that we have a duty to not harm them. Another possibility is that we have a duty to protect them. In either case, however, to satisfy the duties to future generations from environmental or political degradation, we need to engage in widespread collective action. But, as we are, we have a limited ability to do so, in part because we lack the self-discipline necessary for successful collective (...)
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  26. Language Agents Reduce the Risk of Existential Catastrophe.Simon Goldstein & Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini - 2023 - AI and Society:1-11.
    Recent advances in natural language processing have given rise to a new kind of AI architecture: the language agent. By repeatedly calling an LLM to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, language agents are able to function autonomously to pursue goals specified in natural language and stored in a human-readable format. Because of their architecture, language agents exhibit behavior that is predictable according to the laws of folk psychology: they function as though they have desires and beliefs, and then make (...)
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  27. Welcome to the Machine: AI, Existential Risk, and the Iron Cage of Modernity.Jay A. Gupta - 2023 - Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2023 (203):163-169.
    ExcerptRecent advances in the functional power of artificial intelligence (AI) have prompted an urgent warning from industry leaders and researchers concerning its “profound risks to society and humanity.”1 Their open letter is admirable not only for its succinct identification of said risks, which include the mass dissemination of misinformation, loss of jobs, and even the possible extinction of our species, but also for its clear normative framing of the problem: “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and (...)
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  28. Unfinished Business.Jonathan Knutzen - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (1): 4, 1-15.
    According to an intriguing though somewhat enigmatic line of thought first proposed by Jonathan Bennett, if humanity went extinct any time soon this would be unfortunate because important business would be left unfinished. This line of thought remains largely unexplored. I offer an interpretation of the idea that captures its intuitive appeal, is consistent with plausible constraints, and makes it non-redundant to other views in the literature. The resulting view contrasts with a welfare-promotion perspective, according to which extinction would be (...)
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  29. Book Review "Thomas Moynihan: X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered its Own Extinction". [REVIEW]Kritika Maheshwari - 2023 - Intergenerational Justice Review 8 (2):61-62.
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  30. Diving to extinction: Water birds at risk.Minh-Hoang Nguyen - 2023 - Sm3D Portal.
    Our Earth’s climate is changing. Any species living in the Earth’s ecosystem need to thrive to adapt to the new living conditions. Otherwise, extinction will be their outcome. In the race for adaptation, waterbirds (Aequorlitornithes), such as penguins, cormorants, and alcids, seem disadvantageous.
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  31. The Myth of “Just” Nuclear Deterrence: Time for a New Strategy to Protect Humanity from Existential Nuclear Risk.Joan Rohlfing - 2023 - Ethics and International Affairs 37 (1):39-49.
    Nuclear weapons are different from every other type of weapons technology. Their awesome destructive potential and the unparalleled consequences of their use oblige us to think critically about the ethics of nuclear possession, planning, and use. Joe Nye has given the ethics of nuclear weapons deep consideration. He posits that we have a basic moral obligation to future generations to preserve roughly equal access to important values, including equal chances of survival, and proposes criteria for achieving conditional or “just deterrence” (...)
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  32. (1 other version)Economic inequality and the long-term future.Andreas T. Schmidt & Daan Juijn - 2023 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics (1):67-99.
    Why, if at all, should we object to economic inequality? Some central arguments – the argument from decreasing marginal utility for example – invoke instrumental reasons and object to inequality because of its effects. Such instrumental arguments, however, often concern only the static effects of inequality and neglect its intertemporal conse- quences. In this article, we address this striking gap and investigate income inequality’s intertemporal consequences, including its potential effects on humanity’s (very) long-term future. Following recent arguments around future generations (...)
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  33. The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. By Toby Ord. [REVIEW]Daniel John Sportiello - 2023 - American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 97 (1):147-150.
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  34. (1 other version)The epistemic challenge to longtermism.Christian Tarsney - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-37.
    Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict — perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism. To that (...)
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  35. High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation.David Thorstad - 2023 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 51 (4):373-412.
    Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 4, Page 373-412, Fall 2023.
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  36. How does Artificial Intelligence Pose an Existential Risk?Karina Vold & Daniel R. Harris - 2023 - In Carissa Véliz (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. Oxford University Press.
    Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing, warned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could one day pose an existential risk to humanity. Today, recent advancements in the field AI have been accompanied by a renewed set of existential warnings. But what exactly constitutes an existential risk? And how exactly does AI pose such a threat? In this chapter we aim to answer these questions. In particular, we will critically explore three commonly cited reasons for thinking that AI poses an existential (...)
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  37. Human Extinction and Moral Worthwhileness.Elizabeth Finneron-Burns - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (1):105-112.
    In this article I make two main critiques of Kaczmarek and Beard's article ‘Human Extinction and Our Obligations to the Past’. First, I argue that there is an ambiguity in what it means to realise the benefits of a sacrifice and that this ambiguity affects the persuasiveness of the authors’ arguments and responses to various objections to their view. Second, I argue that their core argument against human extinction depends on an unsupported assumption about the existence and importance of existential (...)
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  38. The precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity. Ord, Toby. New York: Hachette, 2020. 468 pp. US$30. ISBN 9780316484916 (Hardback). [REVIEW]David Heyd - 2022 - Bioethics 36 (9):1001-1002.
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  39. What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View.William MacAskill - 2022 - Basic Books.
    A guide for making the future go better. Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more – or it could end tomorrow. Staggering numbers of people will lead lives of flourishing or misery or never live at all, depending on what we do today.
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  40. The Worst Case: Planetary Defense against a Doomsday Impactor.Joel Marks - 2022 - Space Policy 61.
    Current planetary defense policy prioritizes a probability assessment of risk of Earth impact by an asteroid or a comet in the planning of detection and mitigation strategies and in setting the levels of urgency and budgeting to operationalize them. The result has been a focus on asteroids of Tunguska size, which could destroy a city or a region, since this is the most likely sort of object we would need to defend against. However a complete risk assessment would consider not (...)
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  41. Nuclear Fine-Tuning and the Illusion of Teleology.Ember Reed - 2022 - Sound Ideas.
    Recent existential-risk thinkers have noted that the analysis of the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence, and the analysis of certain forms of existential risk, employ similar types of reasoning. This paper argues that insofar as the “many worlds objection” undermines the inference to God’s existence from universal fine-tuning, then a similar many worlds objection undermines the inference that the historic risk of global nuclear catastrophe has been low from the lack of such a catastrophe has occurred in our world. A (...)
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  42. Nuclear war as a predictable surprise.Matthew Rendall - 2022 - Global Policy 13 (5):782-791.
    Like asteroids, hundred-year floods and pandemic disease, thermonuclear war is a low-frequency, high-impact threat. In the long run, catastrophe is inevitable if nothing is done − yet each successive government and generation may fail to address it. Drawing on risk perception research, this paper argues that psychological biases cause the threat of nuclear war to receive less attention than it deserves. Nuclear deterrence is, moreover, a ‘front-loaded good’: its benefits accrue disproportionately to proximate generations, whereas much of the expected cost (...)
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  43. COVID-19 PANDEMIC AS AN INDICATOR OF EXISTENTIAL EVOLUTIONARY RISK OF ANTHROPOCENE (ANTHROPOLOGICAL ORIGIN AND GLOBAL POLITICAL MECHANISMS).Valentin Cheshko & Konnova Nina - 2021 - In MOChashin O. Kristal (ed.), Bioethics: from theory to practice. pp. 29-44.
    The coronavirus pandemic, like its predecessors - AIDS, Ebola, etc., is evidence of the evolutionary instability of the socio-cultural and ecological niche created by mankind, as the main factor in the evolutionary success of our biological species and the civilization created by it. At least, this applies to the modern global civilization, which is called technogenic or technological, although it exists in several varieties. As we hope to show, the current crisis has less ontological as well as epistemological roots; its (...)
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  44. Interplanetary Expansion and the Deep Future.Margarida Hermida - 2021 - In Jeffery L. Nicholas (ed.), The Expanse and Philosophy. Wiley. pp. 13–24.
    In The Expanse, the future of humanity is constantly at stake. In The Expanse vestiges of an ancient alien civilization with incredibly advanced technology have been found—which eventually permits human interstellar expansion through the gates. James Lenman argues that, even if we agree that biodiversity is a good thing, it only means that it's good that there should be natural diversity while life exists on Earth. While we might not be facing interplanetary war or the unpredictable consequences of ancient alien (...)
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  45. Existential risk from AI and orthogonality: Can we have it both ways?Vincent C. Müller & Michael Cannon - 2021 - Ratio 35 (1):25-36.
    The standard argument to the conclusion that artificial intelligence (AI) constitutes an existential risk for the human species uses two premises: (1) AI may reach superintelligent levels, at which point we humans lose control (the ‘singularity claim’); (2) Any level of intelligence can go along with any goal (the ‘orthogonality thesis’). We find that the singularity claim requires a notion of ‘general intelligence’, while the orthogonality thesis requires a notion of ‘instrumental intelligence’. If this interpretation is correct, they cannot be (...)
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  46. Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Bloomsbury, 2020.Benedikt Namdar & Thomas Pölzler - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (3):855-857.
  47. Human Extinction from a Thomist Perspective.Stefan Riedener - 2021 - In Stefan Riedener, Dominic Roser & Markus Huppenbauer (eds.), Effective Altruism and Religion: Synergies, Tensions, Dialogue. Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos. pp. 187-210.
    “Existential risks” are risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential: risks of nuclear wars, pandemics, supervolcano eruptions, and so on. On standard utilitarianism, it seems, the reduction of such risks should be a key global priority today. Many effective altruists agree with this verdict. But how should the importance of these risks be assessed on a Christian moral theory? In this paper, I begin to answer this question – taking Thomas Aquinas as a reference, and the risks of (...)
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  48. The Precipice – Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Toby Ord, 2020 London, Bloomsbury Publishing. 480 pp, £22.50. [REVIEW]Martin Sand - 2021 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (4):722-724.
    Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  49. Human Extinction and Our Obligations to the Past.Patrick Kaczmarek & Simon Beard - 2020 - Utilitas 32 (2):199-208.
    On certain plausible views, if humanity were to unanimously decide to cause its own extinction, this would not be wrong, since there is no one whom this act would wrong. We argue this is incorrect. Causing human extinction would still wrong someone; namely, our forebears who sacrificed life, limb and livelihood for the good of posterity, and whose sacrifices would be made less morally worthwhile by this heinous act.
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  50. If now isn't the most influential time ever, when is? [REVIEW]Kritika Maheshwari - 2020 - The Philosopher 108:94-101.
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