Existential Risk

See also Category:Existential Risk

From the SL4 Lexicon:

Existential Risk:

A risk to the existence of humanity or life-in-general Bostrom99. If the abrupt and unnatural destruction of one life is bad, then the destruction of, say, six billion lives would be six billion times as bad, or worse. One death is a tragedy, six billion deaths is not a statistic; it is a massive tragedy. Possible Existential Risks include a Nanotechnological Arms Race, a killer virus, or an UnFriendly AI. Nuclear weapons are less likely to wipe humanity out entirely. See Dr. Nick Bostrom's original paper on Existential Risks at http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html. See also UnFriendly Singularity, Nanotechnological Arms Race.

---

aka Extinction Risk

Here is a good blog post about extinction risks: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2008/09/ideas-for-mitigating-extinction-risk/