Existential Risk
An existential risk, often shortened to x-risk, is a risk that could cause human extinction or permanently and drastically limit humanity's future. The philosopher Nick Bostrom defined it in a 2002 paper as a risk "where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential".[1]
Sources of risk
Existential risks are commonly divided into natural risks, such as asteroid impacts and supervolcanic eruptions, and risks created by humans. The second group includes nuclear war, engineered pandemics, extreme climate change and advanced artificial intelligence, and is generally thought to be the larger. Toby Ord's book The Precipice (2020) argues that humanity has entered a period in which its technological power makes such risks unusually high.[2]
Risk from artificial intelligence became a mainstream concern in the 2020s. In May 2023, hundreds of AI researchers and executives, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic, signed a one-sentence statement from the Center for AI Safety declaring that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war".[3] Eliezer Yudkowsky is among the most prominent advocates of the view that advanced AI is likely to cause human extinction.
Study and responses
The study of existential risk developed largely within the effective altruism community and at the Future of Humanity Institute, which Bostrom founded at Oxford in 2005. Concern for existential risk is central to longtermism, which holds that protecting the long-term future is a key moral priority. Vitalik Buterin's defensive accelerationism proposes building defensive and decentralizing technologies as a response to such risks.
Critics argue that the focus on speculative future catastrophes draws attention away from present harms, and Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres include the movements built around existential risk in their TESCREAL critique.
See also
References
- ↑ Nick Bostrom (2002). "Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards". Journal of Evolution and Technology. Retrieved November 11, 2026.
- ↑ Toby Ord. "The Precipice". Retrieved November 11, 2026.
- ↑ May 30, 2023. "Statement on AI Risk". Center for AI Safety. Retrieved November 11, 2026.