Climate change and nuclear war in particular are serious global challenges. How should we think about the existential threats that lurk behind our incremental progress? No one can prophesy that a cataclysm will never happen, and this writing contains no such assurance. The book’s Amazon page notes, “Customers who viewed this item also viewed Global Catastrophic Risks Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.” Techno-philanthropists have bankrolled research institutes dedicated to discovering new existential threats and figuring out how to save the world from them, including the Future of Humanity Institute, the Future of Life Institute, the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, and the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. Rees tapped a rich vein of catastrophism. In 2003, astrophysicist Martin Rees published a book entitled Our Final Hour, in which he warned that “humankind is potentially the maker of its own demise,” and laid out some dozen ways in which we have “endangered the future of the entire universe.” For example, experiments in particle colliders could create a black hole that would annihilate Earth, or a “strangelet” of compressed quarks that would cause all matter in the cosmos to bind to it and disappear. But those who warn of the higher-tech dangers are often scientists and technologists who have deployed their ingenuity to identify ever more ways in which the world will soon end. The sentinels for the familiar horsemen tended to be romantics and Luddites. They have recently been joined by a cavalry of more-exotic knights: nanobots that will engulf us, robots that will enslave us, artificial intelligence that will turn us into raw materials, and Bulgarian teenagers who will brew a genocidal virus or take down the internet from their bedrooms. Or we will be blindsided by a black swan, a four-sigma event far along the tail of the statistical distribution of hazards, with low odds but calamitous harm.įor half a century, the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse have been overpopulation, resource shortages, pollution, and nuclear war. Or we are playing Russian roulette, and the deadly odds are bound to catch up to us.

We are cheerfully hurtling toward a catastrophe, they say, like the man who fell off the roof and said, “So far so good” as he passed each floor.

When pessimists are forced to concede that life has been getting better and better for more and more people, they have a retort at the ready. Despite the gory headlines, objective data show that people all over the world are, on average, living longer, contracting fewer diseases, eating more food, spending more time in school, getting access to more culture, and becoming less likely to be killed in a war, murder, or an accident.

Robopocalypse