Human Extinction

By Nick Bostrom
The Atlantic, March 2012

Edited by Andy Ross

If future generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. I think the biggest existential risks relate to certain future technological capabilities that we might develop. Machine intelligence or molecular nanotechnology could lead to new kinds of weapons systems. It seems unlikely that any natural existential risks would kill us all in the next hundred years.

An observation selection effect is a selection effect introduced not by limitations in our measurement instrument, but rather by the fact that all observations require the existence of an observer. For instance, intelligent life evolved on Earth. But the idea that therefore life is likely to evolve on most Earth-like planets overlooks an observation selection effect. When it comes to human extinction and existential risk, observation selection effects might be relevant.

Think of yourself as if you were a randomly selected observer of some larger reference class of observers. This applies to the doomsday argument that we underestimate the probability that the human species will perish soon. Compare two hypotheses about how long the human species will last in terms of how many total people have existed and will come to exist. One hypothesis is that a total of 200 billion humans will have ever existed at the end of time, the other that 200 trillion humans will have ever existed.

Estimating that there have been 100 billion humans so far, you get a probability shift in favor of the hypothesis that only 200 billion humans will ever have existed. That's because if you are a random sample of all the people who will ever have existed, the chance that you will come up with a birth rank of 100 billion is much larger if there are only 200 billion in total than if there are 200 trillion in total. You are unlikely to be among the very first people ever.

Human beings have been around for roughly a hundred thousand years, but there are going to be new kinds of risks that haven't existed to this point in human history that might give us the means to create new kinds of weapons or new kinds of accidents. The fact that we've been around for a hundred thousand years wouldn't give us much confidence with respect to those risks. Any species anywhere will think of themselves as having survived up to the current time because of the observation selection effect. You don't observe yourself after you've gone extinct.

Existential risks include the permanent destruction of our potential for desirable future development. Our permanent failure to develop the sort of technologies that would fundamentally improve the quality of human life would be an existential catastrophe. I think there are vastly better ways of being than we humans can currently reach and experience. We have fundamental biological limitations. The world could be a lot better both in the transhuman way and in more elementary ways. A permanent failure to realize better modes of being is an existential risk.

Various developments in biotechnology and synthetic biology are quite disconcerting. We are gaining the ability to create designer pathogens and blueprints of various disease organisms are in the public domain. We're also developing machines that can take a digital blueprint as an input and print out the DNA string. Soon they will be able to print out such viruses. So already there you have a kind of predictable risk, and then once you can start modifying these organisms in certain kinds of ways, there is a whole additional frontier of danger. There are also different kinds of population control that worry me, such as psychopharmacology.

We are doing new things and there is a risk that something could go wrong. Even with nuclear weapons, suppose it had turned out that there was a way to make a nuclear weapon by baking sand in a microwave oven or something like that. If it had turned out that way then where would we be now? Presumably once that discovery had been made civilization would have been doomed.

Perhaps we are in fact living in a simulation as opposed to physical reality:
(1) Civilizations like ours go extinct before reaching technological maturity.
(2) Mature civilizations lose interest in creating detailed ancestor simulations.
(3) We're almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

If (1) is true, we will succumb to an existential catastrophe before reaching technological maturity. If (1) is false, some civilizations at our stage will reach technological maturity. If (2) is also false, some of those mature civilizations retain an interest in creating ancestor simulations. A technologically mature civilization could create astronomical numbers of these simulations, many more than there were original histories. So almost all observers with our types of experiences would be living in simulations. If so, and if we are typical observers, (3) is true. We are living in a computer simulation. We could be deleted.

How do we survive the Singularity?
 

AR  Professor Bostrom is director of the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford. I sent him a copy of my book G.O.D. Is Great,
which covers his range of interests rather closely, and he didn't reply. Thanks, Nick.