Is humanity at risk of going extinct ? Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom (who is also famous for the claim that we are all living in a computer simulation) thinks that it is; but even more troubling, he says, is how much we tend to underestimate that risk.

The Atlantic's Ross Anderson recently sat down with Bostrom to discuss the dangers threatening our existence in greater detail. We've included a few of Anderson's introductory discussion points here, but you'll want to click through to read the interview in its entirety.


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?


In the short term you don't seem especially worried about existential risks that originate in nature like asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes and so forth. Instead you have argued that the majority of future existential risks to humanity are anthropogenic, meaning that they arise from human activity. Nuclear war springs to mind as an obvious example of this kind of risk, but that's been with us for some time now. What are some of the more futuristic or counterintuitive ways that we might bring about our own extinction?



And why shouldn't we be as worried about natural existential risks in the short term?

Bostrom: One way of making that argument is to say that we've survived for over 100 thousand years, so it seems prima facie unlikely that any natural existential risks would do us in here in the short term, in the next hundred years for instance. Whereas, by contrast we are going to introduce entirely new risk factors in this century through our technological innovations and we don't have any track record of surviving those.


Read the rest over on The Atlantic
Top image by Vladimir Manyuhin via Professional Photography Blog