Human extinction: thinking the unthinkable, with Sean ÓhÉigeartaigh

Our subject in this episode may seem grim – it’s the potential extinction of the human species, either from a natural disaster, like a supervolcano or an asteroid, or from our own human activities, such as nuclear weapons, greenhouse gas emissions, engineered biopathogens, misaligned artificial intelligence, or high energy physics experiments causing a cataclysmic rupture in space and time.

These scenarios aren’t pleasant to contemplate, but there’s a school of thought that urges us to take them seriously – to think about the unthinkable, in the phrase coined in 1962 by pioneering futurist Herman Kahn. Over the last couple of decades, few people have been thinking about the unthinkable more carefully and systematically than our guest today, Sean ÓhÉigeartaigh. Sean is the author of a recent summary article from Cambridge University Press that we’ll be discussing, “Extinction of the human species: What could cause it and how likely is it to occur?”

Sean is presently based in Cambridge where he is a Programme Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Previously he was founding Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and before that, he managed research activities at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford.

Selected follow-ups:

• Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh - Leverhulme Centre Profile
• Extinction of the human species - by Sean ÓhÉigeartaigh
• Herman Kahn - Wikipedia
• Moral.me - by Conscium
• Classifying global catastrophic risks - by Shahar Avin et al
• Defence in Depth Against Human Extinction - by Anders Sandberg et al
• The Precipice - book by Toby Ord
• Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks - by METR
• Cold Takes - blog by Holden Karnofsky
• What Comes After the Paris AI Summit? - Article by Sean
• ARC-AGI - by François Chollet
• Henry Shevlin - Leverhulme Centre profile
• Eleos (includes Rosie Campbell and Robert Long)
• NeurIPS talk by David Chalmers
• Trustworthy AI Systems To Monitor Other AI: Yoshua Bengio
• The Unilateralist’s Curse - by Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, availab

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