By Ross Andersen – We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.
Bostrom, who directs Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society.
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. more> http://tinyurl.com/7rdnqt5
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