Will we survive the next 100 years?

In May, experts from many fields gathered in Montenegro to discuss the topic "Existential Threats and Other Disasters: How Should We Address Them". The term "existential risk" was popularized in a 2002 essay by philosopher Niko Bostrom, who defined it as a risk in which "a negative outcome could either destroy intelligent life on Earth, or permanently and drastically reduce its potential."

To understand the difference between existential risks and other disasters, let's take climate change as an example. In some scenarios, uncontrolled global warming could make most of the Earth too hot for human life to continue on it, but Antarctica and some of the northernmost regions of Europe, Asia and North America would become habitable.

This would reduce the potential for intelligent life on Earth, perhaps for millennia, but the planet would eventually cool and the descendants of the survivors would repopulate it. If these are indeed worst-case scenarios, then climate change, as catastrophic as it may be, is not an existential risk.

Of course, if the severity of a disaster is directly proportional to the number of people it kills, the difference between a disaster that kills almost the entire human population on Earth and one that leads to its extermination would not be so great. However, for many philosophers concerned with existential risk, this view fails to take into account the huge number of people who would be born if our species survived for a long time, but would not be born if homo sapiens went extinct.

The conference in Montenegro, which has "other disasters" in its title, was not limited only to existential risks, but a large part of the discussion was devoted to them. As the final session of the conference drew to a close, some of the attendees felt that the issues we discussed were so serious, yet so neglected, that we should try to draw the attention of the public and governments to this topic. The general tone of such a statement was debated, and I was a member of the small group appointed to make it.

The statement emphasizes the existence of serious risks to the survival of humanity, which in most cases are man-made, either intentionally, such as bioterrorism, or unintentionally, such as climate change or the creation of artificial superintelligence that is not aligned with our values. The statement also states that governments are not treating these risks with the seriousness or urgency they deserve.

The position expressed in the statement is supported by two claims made by Tobi Ord in his 2020 book, Precipice. Ord estimated the probability of our species becoming extinct in the next 100 years at 16-17%, or one in 6. He also estimated that the proportion of global GDP that humanity spends on interventions aimed at reducing this risk is less than 0,001%.

In an update published in July, Ord said new evidence suggests the most extreme climate change scenarios are unlikely, and that the existential risk posed by climate change is less than he thought in 2020. On the other hand, the war in Ukraine means that the risk of a nuclear war that could cause our extinction is greater, while the risks of superintelligent AI and pandemics are, in his opinion, lower in some respects and higher in others.

Ord believes that the focus on chatbots is taking artificial intelligence (AI) in a less dangerous direction, because they are not agents. He believes, however, that increased competition in the race to create advanced general artificial intelligence is likely to shorten AI safety procedures.

Overall, Ord hasn't changed his estimate — though he admits it's very rough — that there's a one-in-six chance our species won't survive the next 100 years. He welcomes the fact that there is now increased global interest in reducing the risk of extinction and cites as examples the inclusion of the topic in the 2021 report of the United Nations Secretary-General, as well as its prominent place on the agenda of an international group of former world leaders known as "The Elders". .

The statement from Montenegro calls on governments to work together to prevent existential catastrophes and specifically calls on the governments of rich countries to invest "significant resources" in finding the best ways to reduce the risk of human extinction. Although the statement does not specify what "significant" means in this context, Ord has elsewhere proposed to set aside 1% of global GDP to reduce the risk of extinction of our species. That is a thousand times more than his estimate from 2020 of how much governments were spending on this task at the time, but it is really hard to argue that it is too much.

The author is Professor Emeritus of Bioethics at Princeton University; is the founder of the non-profit organization The Life You Can Save

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024. (translation: NR)

* The international conference "Existential Threats and Other Disasters: How Should We Address Them" was held in Budva, Montenegro, on May 30-31, 2024, organized by the Center for Bioethics studies, the Hastings Center and the Oxford Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics (ed.)