Anthropogenic Existential Risk

Anthropogenic existential risk refers to existential risks arising from human activity, as distinguished from natural existential risks such as asteroid impacts or supervolcanic eruptions. The category includes unaligned artificial intelligence, nuclear war, engineered pandemics, and climate change — threats that did not exist before human technological development and that are driven by the interaction of human capabilities with human institutional failures.

The defining structural feature of anthropogenic existential risk is the unilateralist's curse: the risk is determined by the actions of the least cautious actor, not the most cautious. A single nation, corporation, or individual can develop a technology whose misuse or misalignment threatens all of humanity. This asymmetry — distributed power to threaten, universal vulnerability to the threat — makes anthropogenic risks uniquely difficult to govern through traditional international institutions.

Nick Bostrom has argued that anthropogenic risks are likely to dominate natural risks in the present century, both because our technological capabilities continue to grow and because our governance structures have not adapted to the pace of that growth. The Future of Humanity Institute made the study of anthropogenic existential risk its central mission, recognizing that the most urgent threats are those we create ourselves.