Does Humanity Have a Future, and If So, How Bad Will It Be?

Catalog description

There are a number of reasons for worry about the future of humanity. Some of these reasons concern threats with fairly low probability, such as collisions with giant meteors, but others are concerned with possibilities that seem quite close at hand. The latter threats include climate change, of course, but also runaway AI, nuclear war, lethal viruses (both natural and designed), and loss of essential features of our humanity due to genetic engineering. This course will consider the consequences of such threats, should they become actual, and also estimates of their probability. For the most part, however, we will be concerned with moral, political, and metaphysical questions that they pose. Do future generations have any claim on us? If so, why?