Global Catastrophic Risks: Apocalyptic Threat Assessment

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In a brief essay (500 word minimum), address the following: 1) summarize Bostrom and Cirkovic’s model for evaluating the severity of risk associated with a global catastrophic threat, and 2) apply this model to an “apocalyptic” scenario of your own choosing (e.g. transhumanism, totalitarianism, super-volcanoes, asteroids, pandemic, etc…), identify where it fits in the risk assessment model and explain in the essay what the threat is and how we might better understand this threat by employing the risk assessment model.

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re ........... 473 ........... .......... 473 474 475 476 .......... 481 .......... .......... ·1· Introd uction Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovu: I i ~ .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... I t 482 482 483 484 486 487 .......... 488 .......... 496 498 499 502 j ~ i j ;'i i I 'f 504 504 506 510 511 512 514 514 515 516 518 518 ~. 520 531 ~ • t) 1.1 Why? The term 'global catastrophic risk' lacks a sharp definition. We use it to refer, loosely, to a risk that might have the potential to inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale. On this definition, an immensely diverse collection of events could constitute global catastrophes: potential candidates range from volcanic eruptions to pandemic infections, nuclear accidents to worldwide tyrannies, out-of-control scientific experiments to climatic changes, and cosmic hazards to economic collapse. With this in mind, one might well ask, what use is a book on global catastrophic risk? The risks under consideration seem to have little in common, so does 'global catastrophic risk' even make sense as a topic? Or is the book that you hold in your hands as illconceived and unfocused a project as a volume on 'Gardening, Matrix Algebra, and the History of Byzantium'? We are confident that a comprehensive treatment of global catastrophic risk will be at least somewhat more useful and coherent than the above-mentioned imaginary title. We also believe that studying this topic is highly important. Although the risks are of various kinds, they are tied together by many links and commonalities. For example, for many types of destructive events, much of the damage results from second-order impacts on social order; thus the risks of social disruption and collapse are not unrelated to the risks of events such as nuclear terrorism or pandemic disease. Or to take another example, apparently dissimilar events such as large asteroid impacts, volcanic super-eruptions, and nuclear war would all eject massive amounts of soot and aerosols into the atmosphere, with significant effects on global climate. The existence of such causal linkages is one reason why it is can be sensible to study multiple risks together. Another commonality is that many methodological, conceptual, and cultural issues crop up across the range of global catastrophic risks. If our interest lies in such issues, it is often illuminating to study how they play out in different contexts. Conversely, some general insights - for example, into the biases of human risk cognition - can be applied to many different risks and used to improve our assessments across the board . 2 Global catastrophic risks Beyond these theoretical commonalities, there are also pragmatic reasons for addressing global catastrophic risks as a single field. Attention is scarce. Mitigation is costly. To decide how to allocate effort and resources, we must make comparative judgements. If we treat risks singly, and never as part of an overall threat profile, we may become unduly fixated on the one or two dangers that happen to have captured the public or expert imagination of the day, while neglecting other risks that are more severe or more amenable to mitigation. Alternatively, we may fail to see that some precautionary policy, while effective in reducing the particular risk we are focusing on, would at the same time create new hazards and result in an increase in the overall level of risk. A broader view allows us to gain perspective and can thereby help us to set wiser priorities. The immediate aim of this book is to offer an introduction to the range of global catastrophic risks facing humanity now or expected in the future, suitable for an educated interdisciplinary readership. There are several constituencies for the knowledge presented. Academics specializing in one of these risk areas will benefit from learning about the other risks. Professionals in insurance, finance, and business - although usually preoccupied with more limited and imminent challenges - will benefit from a wider view. Policy analysts, activists, and laypeople concerned with promoting responsible policies likewise stand to gain from learning about the state of the art in global risk studies. Finally, anyone who is worried or simply curious about what could go wrong in the modern world might find many of the following chapters intriguing. We hope that this volume will serve as a useful introduction to all of these audiences. Each of the chapters ends with some pointers to the literature for those who wish to delve deeper into a particular set of issues. This volume also has a wider goal: to stimulate increased research, awareness, and informed public discussion about big risks and mitigation strategies. The existence of an interdisciplinary community of experts and laypeople knowledgeable about global catastrophic risks will, we believe, improve the odds that good solutions will be found and implemented to the great challenges of the twenty-first century. 1.2 Taxonomy and organization Let us look more closely at what would, and would not, count as a global catastrophic risk. Recall that the damage must be serious, and the scale global. Given this, a catastrophe that caused 10,000 fatalities or 10 billion dollars. worth of economic damage (e.g., a major earthquake) would not qualify as a global catastrophe. A catastrophe that caused 10 million fatalities or 10 trillion dollars worth of economic loss (e.g., an influenza pandemic) would count as a global catastrophe, even if some region of the world escaped unscathed. As for < , Introduction disasters falling between these points, the definition is vague. The stipulation of a precise cut-off does not appear needful at this stage. Global catastrophes have occurred many times in history, even if we only count disasters causing more than 10 million deaths. A very partial list of examples might include the An Shi Rebellion (756-763), the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), and the famine of the Great Leap Forward in China, the Black Death in Europe, the Spanish flu pandemic, the two world wars, the Nazi genocides, the famines in British India, Stalinist totalitarianism, the decimation of the native American population through smallpox and other diseases following the arrival of European colonizers" probably the Mongol conquests, perhaps Belgian Congo - innumerable others could be added to the list depending on how various misfortunes and chronic conditions are individuated and classified. We can roughly characterize the severity of a risk by three variables: its scope (how many people - and other morally relevant beings - would be affected), its intensity (how badly these would be affected), and its probability (how likely the disaster is to occur, according to our best judgement, given currently available evidence). Using the first two of these variables, we can construct a qualitative diagram of different types of risk (Fig. 1.1). (The probability dimension could be displayed along a z-axis were this diagram three-dimensional.) The scope of a risk can be personal (affecting only one person), local, global (affecting a large part of the human population), or trans-generational (affecting isons :arce. must ut of ~two if the ile to olicy, it the .el of us to ange ture, veral ae of mals with new. sible lobal ould rters III to ) the s. Itch, rtion and ieve, » the Scope (Cosmic?) , .s f' ~ ~ Transgenerational i ------------- ----~~~ ~ Loss of one species of beetle --- - - ----- -- Global : Drastic loss of Existential risks : biodiversity ..-----.-.-.:~~~:+.: scussion by Richard . 9. Posner notes that often impeded by the j terms of office and srmore, mitigation of 1 free-rider problem. hope of taking a free .il countries, in turn, iders, : tsunamis, asteroid lobal warming, and osed by these risks. 'ays possible, it is es, potential harms, order to determine suggests that when ncd as 'Obesity, diabetes case; resistant bacterial most standards, obesity, much would health care . whether this definition 1.4 Part II: Risks from nature Volcanic eruptions in recent historical times have had measurable effects on global climate, causing global cooling by a few tenths of one degree, the effect lasting perhaps a year. But as Michael Rampino explains in Chapter 10, these eruptions pale in comparison to the largest recorded eruptions. Approximately 75,000 years ago, a volcano erupted in Toba, Indonesia, spewing vast volumes of fine ash and aerosols into the atmosphere, with effects comparable to nuclear-winter scenarios. Land temperatures globally dropped by 5-l5°C, and ocean-surface cooling of ~2-6°C might have extended over several years. The persistence of significant soot in the atmosphere for one to three years might have led to a cooling of the climate lasting for decades (because of climate feedbacks such as increased snow cover and sea ice causing more of the sun's radiation to be reflected back into space). The human population appears to have gone through a bottleneck at this time, according to some estimates dropping as low as approximately five hundred reproducing females in a world population of approximately 4000 individuals. On the Toba catastrophe theory, the population decline was caused by the super-eruption, and the human species was teetering on the brink of extinction. This is perhaps the worst disaster that has ever befallen the human species, at least if severity is measured by how close to terminal was the outcome. More than twenty super-eruption sites for the last two million years have been identified. This would suggest that, on average, a super-eruption occurs at least once every 50,000 years. However, there may well have been additional super-eruptions that have not yet been identified in the geological record. IJ...• 7 This heuristic is only meant to be a first stab at the problem. It is obviously not generally valid. For example, if one million dollars is sufficient to take all the possible precautions, there is no reason to spend more on the risk even if we think that its probability is much greater than 1/1000 . A more careful analysis would consider the marginal returns on investment in risk reduction. 14 Global catastrophic risks The global damage from super-volcanism would come chiefly from its climatic effects. The volcanic winter that would follow such an eruption would cause a drop in agricultural productivity which could lead to mass starvation and consequent social upheavals. Rampino's analysis of the impacts of supervolcanism is also relevant to the risks of nuclear war and asteroid or meteor impacts. Each of these would involve soot and aerosols being injected into the atmosphere, cooling the Earth's climate. Although we have no way of preventing a super-eruption, there are precautions that we could take to mitigate its impacts. At present, a global stockpile equivalent to a two-month supply of grain exists. In a super-volcanic catastrophe, growing seasons might be curtailed for several years. A larger stockpile of grain and other foodstuffs, while expensive to maintain, would provide a buffer for a range of catastrophe scenarios involving temporary reductions in world agricultural productivity. The hazard from comets and meteors is perhaps the best understood of all global catastrophic risks (which is not to deny that significant uncertainties remain). Chapter 11, by William Napier, explains some of the science behind the impact hazards: where comets and asteroids come from, how frequently impacts occur, and what the effects of an impact would be. To produce a civilization-disrupting event, an impactor would need a diameter of at least one or two kilometre. A ten kilornetre impactor would, it appears, have a good chance of causing the extinction of the human species. But even sub-kilometre impactors could produce damage reaching the level of global catastrophe, depending on their composition, velocity, angle, and impact site. Napier estimates that 'the per capita impact hazard is at the level associated with the hazards of air travel and the like'. However, funding for mitigation is meager compared to funding for air safety. The main effort currently underway to address the impact hazard is the Spaceguard project, which receives about four million dollars per annum from NASA besides in-kind and voluntary contributions from others. Spaceguard aims to find 90% of near-Earth asteroids larger than one kilometre by the end of 2008. Asteroids constitute the largest portion of the threat from near-Earth objects (and are easier to detect than comets) so when the project is completed, the subjective probability of a large impact will have been reduced considerably - unless, of course, it were discovered that some asteroid has a date with our planet in the near future, in which case the probability would soar. Some preliminary study has been done of how a potential impactor could be deflected. Given sufficient advance warning, it appears that the space technology needed to divert an asteroid could be developed. The cost of producing an effective asteroid defence would be much greater than the cost of searching for potential impactors. However, if a civilization-destroying wrecking ball were found to be swinging towards the Earth, virtually any expense would be justified to avert it before it struck. Asteroids and comet: space. Other co tluctuations in solar act rJYs from supernova ext III Chapter 12 by Arnor I isks appear to be very present time beyond CO] (rum 1.5 Part III: Risks fl We have already encour cooling - as a destructiw('1\ as a possible conseq Y t·t it is the risk of gra g~l$ emissions that has It'cent years. Anthropog j-tlobal threats. Global w t\t(' attention given to gk Ca rbon dioxide and .lHnosphere, where they ,HId a concomitant rise United Nations' Intergo: tqwesents the most aut ;ttt('rnpts to estimate the t'" pcctcd by the end of t. lH,tig;llion are made. ThE 11I1(Ntainty about what tl h•• over the century, uno HII{ ertainry about other f~ III terms of six different .htTerct'lt assumptions. T •I R"C (uncertainty rang (2.4-6.4°C). Estirr • r-na rios of the six consi. Chapter 13, by David hit>:lrscicnce behind din l""h~lbility high-impact s hunk It is, arguably. this •..•o-c ~ A \ ilrnpt'ehcnsivC" review ot __ II> I!\lrllj!l~n\ I'x\ralcrreSI, inl i!h-c H~ll}!iltliSln:i:how vel', thc:·a Introduction Asteroids and comets are not the only potential global catastrophic threats from space. Other cosmic hazards include global climatic change from fluctuations in solar activity, and very large fluxes from radiation and cosmic rays from supernova explosions or gamma ray bursts. These risks are examined in Chapter 12 by Amon Dar. The findings on these risks are favourable: the risks appear to be very small. No particular response seems indicated at the present time beyond continuation of basic research.f ie chiefly from its . an eruption would to mass starvation e impacts of superasteroid or meteor 19 injected into the uption, there are t present, a global In a super-volcanic ral years. A larger J maintain, would volving temporary 1.5 Part III: Risks from unintended consequences t understood of all cant uncertainties :he science behind m, how frequently be. To produce a iameter of at least pears, have a good ven sub-kilometre Iobal catastrophe, t site. he level associated g for mitigation is urrently underway ich receives about .nd and voluntary -ar- Earth asteroids istitute the largest ier to detect than ~ probability of a of course, it were he near future, in ~l impactor could :s that the space oed. The cost of iter than the cost zation-destroying th, virtually any 15 ., I I.:. j if We have already encountered climate change - in the form of sudden global cooling - as a destructive modality of super-eruptions and large impacts (as well as a possible consequence oflarge-scale nuclear war, to be discussed later). Yet it is the risk of gradual global warming brought about by greenhouse gas emissions that has most strongly captured the public imagination in recent years. Anthropogenic climate change has become the poster child of global threats. Global warming commandeers a disproportionate fraction of the attention given to global risks. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, where they are expected to cause a warming of Earth's climate and a concomitant rise in seawater levels. The most recent report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (fPCC), which represents the most authoritative assessment of current scientific opinion, attempts to estimate the increase in global mean temperature that would be expected by the end of this century under the assumption that no efforts at mitigation are made. The final estimate is fraught with uncertainty because of uncertainty about what the default rate of emissions of greenhouse gases will be over the century, uncertainty about the climate sensitivity parameter, and uncertainty about other factors. The IPCC, therefore, expresses its assessment in terms of six different climate scenarios based on different models and different assumptions. The 'low' model predicts a mean global warming of +1.8°C (uncertainty range 1.1-2.9°C); the 'high' model predicts warming by +4.0°C (2.4-6.4°C). Estimated sea level rise predicted by the two most extreme scenarios of the six considered is 18-38 em, and 26-59 em, respectively. Chapter 13, by David Frame and Myles Allen, summarizes some of the basic science behind climate modelling, with particular attention to the lowprobability high-impact scenarios that are most relevant to the focus of this book. It is, arguably, this range of extreme scenarios that gives the greatest k A comprehensive wi I h intelligent microorganisms; review of space hazards would also consider scenarios involving contact extraterrestrial species or contamination from hypothetical extraterrestrial however, these risks are outside the scope of Chapter 12. 16 Global catastrophic risks cause for concern. Although their likelihood seems very low, considerable uncertainty still pervades our understanding of various possible feedbacks that might be triggered by the expected climate forcing (recalling Peter Taylor's point, referred to earlier, about the importance of taking parameter and model uncertainty into account). David Frame and Myles Allen also discuss mitigation policy, highlighting the difficulties of setting appropriate mitigation goals given the uncertainties about what levels of cumulative emissions would constitute 'dangerous anthropogenic interference' in the climate system. Edwin Kilbourne reviews some historically important pandemics in Chapter 14, including the distinctive characteristics of their associated pathogens, and discusses the factors that will determine the extent and consequences of future outbreaks. Infectious disease has exacted an enormous toll of suffering and death on the human species throughout history and continues to do so today. Deaths from infectious disease currently account for approximately 25% of all deaths worldwide. This amounts to approximately 15 million deaths per year. About 75% of these deaths occur in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The top five causes of death due to infectious disease are upper respiratory infection (3.9 million deaths), HIV/AIDS (2.9 million), diarrhoeal disease (1.8 million), tuberculosis (1.7 million), and malaria (1.3 million). Pandemic disease is indisputably one of the biggest global catastrophic risks facing the world today, but it is not always accorded its due recognition. For example, in most people's mental representation of the world, the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 is almost completely overshadowed by the concomitant World War 1. Yet although the WWI is estimated to have directly caused about 10 million military and 9 million civilian fatalities, the Spanish flu is believed to have killed at least 20-50 million people. The relatively low 'dread factor' associated with this pandemic might be partly due to the fact that only approximately 2-3% of those who got sick died from the disease. (The total death count is vast because a large percentage of the world population was infected.) In addition to fighting the major infectious diseases currently plaguing the world, it is vital to remain alert to emerging new diseases with pandemic potential, such as SARS, bird flu, and drug-resistant tuberculosis. As the World Health Organization and its network of collaborating laboratories and local governments have demonstrated repeatedly, decisive early action can sometimes nip an emerging pandemic in the bud, possibly saving the lives of millions. We have chosen to label pandemics a 'risk from unintended consequences' even though most infectious diseases (exempting the potential of genetically engineered bioweapons) in some sense arise from nature. Our rationale is that the evolution as well as the spread of pathogens is highly dependent on human civilization. The worldwide spread of germs became possible only after all the IJdnblll Ihe lorn dISl':I~l' Of wt'ek ;lll ~I fac and cul bomoge it qllickl ·lh(' mas Ir one co bacteria then PJcI rn:ly -nsi ~ ~ 1 t-' Conyers any sin] dangero material By co , immine ~ lI' cause fo of gener as one c Ii It I ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ;;! ; i I , the main superint title of C global ri: As Eli a difficul substant to under: serious ( eruptver hypothe~ from clai it will be abilities take a sh Yudko enormou targets ir superint( beings) iJ I Introduction .onsiderable edbacks that -ter Taylor's r and model s mitigation l goals given d constitute inhabited continents were connected by travel routes. By now, globalization in the form of travel and trade has reached such an extent that a highly contagious disease could spread to virtually all parts of the world within a matter of days or weeks. Kilbourne also draws attention to another aspect of globalization as a factor increasing pandemic risk: homogenization of peoples, practices, and cultures. The more the human population comes to resemble a single homogeneous niche, the greater the potential for a single pathogen to saturate it quickly. Kilbourne mentions the 'one rotten apple syndrome', resulting from the mass production of food and behavioural fads: idemics in associated extent and If one contaminated item, apple, egg or, most recently, spinach leaf carries a billion bacteria - not an unreasonable estimate - and it enters a pool of cake mix constituents then packaged and sent to millions of customers nationwide, a bewildering epidemic may ensue. id death on lay. Deaths ,f all deaths zear. About ca. The top y infection .8 million), ophic risks -cognition. vorld, the Ned by the ve directly LeSpanish atively low ie fact that ease. (The iopulation guing the pandemic s. As the ·ories and ction can ie lives of quences' -netically LIeis that 1 human er all the 17 I J Conversely, cultural as well as genetic diversity reduces the likelihood that any single pattern will be adopted universally before it is discovered to be dangerous - whether the pattern be virus RNA, a dangerous new chemical or material, or a stifling ideology . By contrast to pandemics, artificial intelligence (AI) is not an ongoing or imminent global catastrophic risk. Nor is it as uncontroversially a serious cause for concern. However, from a long-term perspective, the development of general artificial intelligence exceeding that of the human brain can be seen as one of the main challenges to the future of humanity (arguably, even as the main challenge). At the same time, the successful deployment of friendly superintelligence could obviate many of the other risks facing humanity. The title of Chapter 15, 'Artificial Intelligence as a positive and negative factor in global risk', reflects this ambivalent potential. As Eliezer Yudkowsky notes, the prospect of superintelligent machines is a difficult topic to analyse and discuss. Appropriately, therefore, he devotes a substantial part of his chapter to clearing common misconceptions and barriers to understanding. Having done so, he proceeds to give an argument for giving serious consideration to the possibility that radical superintelligence could erupt very suddenly - a scenario that is sometimes referred to as the 'Singularity hypothesis'. Claims aboutthe steepness of the transition must be distinguished from claims about the timing of its onset. One could believe, for example, that it will be a long time before computers are able to match the general reasoning abilities of an average human being, but that once that happens, it will only take a short time for computers to attain radically superhuman levels. Yudkowsky proposes that we conceive of a superintelligence as an enormously powerful optimization process: 'a system which hits small targets in large search spaces to produce coherent real-world effects'. The superintelligence will be able to manipulate the world (including human beings) in such a way as to achieve its goals, whatever those goals might be. 18 Global catastrophic risks To avert disaster, it would be necessary to ensure that the superintelligence is endowed with a 'Friendly' goal system: that is, one that aligns the system's goals with genuine human values. Given this set-up, Yudkowskyidentifies two different ways in which we could fail to build Friendliness into our AI: philosophical failure and technical failure. The warning against philosophical failure is basically that we should be careful what we wish for because we might get it. We might designate a target for the AI which at first sight seems like a nice outcome but which in fact is radically misguided or morally worthless. The warning against technical failure is that we might fail to get what we wish for, because of faulty implementation of the goal system or unintended consequences of the way the target representation was specified. Yudkowsky regards both of these possible failure modes as very serious existential risks and concludes that it is imperative that we figure out how to build Friendliness into a superintelligence before we figure out how to build a superintelligence. Chapter 16 discusses the possibility that the experiments that physicists carry out in particle accelerators might pose an existential risk. Concerns about such risks prompted the director of the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to commission an official report in 2000. Concerns have since resurfaced with the construction of more powerful accelerators such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Following the Brookhaven report, Frank Wilczek distinguishes three catastrophe scenarios: 1. Formation of tiny black holes that could start accreting surrounding matter, eventually swallowing up the entire planet. 2. Formation of negatively charged stable strangelets which could catalyse the conversion of all the ordinary matter on our planet into strange matter. 3. Initiation of a phase transition of the vacuum state, which would propagate outward in all directions at near light speed and destroy not only our planet but the entire accessible part of the universe. Wilczek argues that these scenarios are exceedingly unlikely on various theoretical grounds. In addition, there is a more general argument that these scenarios are extremely improbable which depends less on arcane theory. Cosmic rays often have energies far greater than those that will be attained in any of the planned accelerators. Such rays have been bombarding the Earth's atmosphere (and the moon and other astronomical objects) for billions of years without a single catastrophic effect having been observed. Assuming that collisions in particle accelerators do not differ in any unknown relevant respect from those that occur in the wild, we can be very confident in the safety of our accelerators. By everyone's reckoning, it is highly improbable that particle accelerator experiments will cause an existential disaster. The question is how improbable? And what would constitute an 'acceptable' probability of an existential disaster? III ;tssn ,ltlt( ()Ill< Iling (0; cou ld le: some eXI lip the ri estimate regard tc Chapt .onsequcatastrop '!11C main slip and h and soon about the direct effe economic I This a: those fro: by Yudkc doomed, types of r terrorist; and the J major pal to follow of such a 9 Eveni ourjudgme 10 If expe try to sound accept their verdicts eve In the end, hysterical pi it requires c Introduction lligence ystem's te could failure. careful .for the adically ~is that 1 of the ntation as very .ire out how to :s carry it such ollider dwith 'adron ; three nding .talyse latter. vould )y not rious these .eory. edin .rth's 1S of mng vant afety ator ble? ter? 19 In assessing the probability, we must consider not only how unlikely the outcome seems given our best current models but also the possibility that our best models and calculations might be flawed in some as-yet unrealized way. In doing so we must guard against overconfidence bias (compare Chapter 5 on biases). Unless we ourselves are technically expert, we must also take into account the possibility that the experts on whose judgements we rely might be consciously or unconsciously biased. 9 For example, the physicists who possess the expertise needed to assess the risks from particle physics experiments are part of a professional community that has a direct stake in the experiments going forward. A layperson might worry that the incentives faced by the experts could lead them to err on the side of downplaying the risks.l" Alternatively, some experts might be tempted by the media attention they could get by playing up the risks. The issue of how much and in which circumstances to trust risk estimates by experts is an important one, and it arises quite generally with regard to many of the risks covered in this book. Chapter 17 (by Robin Hanson) from Part III on Risks from unintended consequences focuses on social collapse as a devastation multiplier of other catastrophes. Hanson writes as follows: The main reason to be careful when you walk up a flight of stairs is not that you might slip and have to retrace one step, but rather that the first slip might cause a second slip, and so on until you fall dozens of steps and break your neck. Similarly we are concerned about the sorts of catastrophes explored in this book not only because of their terrible direct effects, but also because they may induce an even more damaging collapse of our economic and social systems. This argument does not apply to some of the risks discussed so far, such as those from particle accelerators or the risks from superintelligence as envisaged by Yudkowsky. In those cases, we may be either completely safe or altogether doomed, with little probability of intermediary outcomes. But for many other types of risk - such as windstorms, tornados, earthquakes, floods, forest fires, terrorist attacks, plagues, and wars - a wide range of outcomes are possible, and the potential for social disruption or even social collapse constitutes a major part of the overall hazard. Hanson notes that many of these risks appear to follow a power law distribution. Depending on the characteristic exponent of such a power law distribution, most of the damage expected from a given 9 Even if we ourselves are expert, we must still be alert to unconscious biases that may influence our judgment (e.g., anthropic biases, see Chapter 6). 10 If experts anticipate that the public will not quite trust their reassurances, they might be led to I ry to sound even more reassuring than they would have if they had believed that the public would .iccept their claims at face value. The public, in turn, might respond by discounting the experts' verdicts even more, leading the experts to be even more wary of fuelling alarmist overreactions. I n the end, experts might be reluctant to acknowledge any risk at all for fear of a triggering a hysterical public overreaction. Effective risk communication is a tricky business, and the trust that Ii n:t] uires can be hard to gain and easy to lose. 20 Global catastrophic risks t)(,t. type of risk may consist either of frequent small disturbances or of rare large catastrophes. Car accidents, for example, have a large exponent, reflecting the fact that most traffic deaths occur in numerous small accidents involving one or two vehicles. Wars and plagues, by contrast, appear to have small exponents, meaning that most of the expected damage occurs in very rare but very large conflicts and pandemics. After giving a thumbnail sketch of economic growth theory, Hanson considers an extreme opposite of economic growth: sudden reduction in productivity brought about by escalating destruction of social capital and coordination. For example, 'a judge who would not normally consider taking a bribe may do so when his life is at stake, allowing others to expect to get away with theft more easily, which leads still others to avoid making investments that might be stolen, and so on. Also, people may be reluctant to trust bank accounts or even paper money, preventing those institutions from functioning.' The productivity of the world economy depends both on scale and on many different forms of capital which must be delicately coordinated. We should be concerned that a relatively small disturbance (or combination of disturbances) to some vulnerable part of this system could cause a far-reaching unraveling of the institutions and expectations upon which the global economy depends. Hanson also offers a suggestion for how we might convert some existential risks into non-existential risks. He proposes that we consider the construction of one or more continuously inhabited refuges - located, perhaps, in a deep mineshaft, and well-stocked with supplies - which could preserve a small but sufficient group of people to repopulate a post-apocalyptic world. It would obviously be preferable to prevent altogether catastrophes of a severity that would make humanity's survival dependent on such modern-day 'Noah's arks'; nevertheless, it might be worth exploring whether some variation of this proposal might be a cost-effective way of somewhat decreasing the probability of human extinction from a range of potential causes. 11 I>r-t '.lll .11 It Ill.i 1 '1ttj! ~i tilll nH)' P"P (is j'( () I \ull II (,Ill!, jllH :,ull 1!.t1 rt II WOII n.i! I rf'l II iiI
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