The Uncertain Future of Humanity

Catalog description

How likely do you think it is that humans will survive the 21st century? What about the next thousand or ten thousand years? Existential threats to the persistence of the human species are called xRisks, and since the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in xRisks has jumped.What might be the biggest threat to humanity? The great xRisk of the twentieth century, of course, was nuclear annihilation. While this remains a very real threat, most of the recent energy in the xRisk space has focused on dramatic technological threats such as runaway artificial intelligence and bioengineered pathogens. For some reason, the threats of climate change and natural pandemics are typically downplayed by the xRisk crowd. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the very concept of sustainability---literally the study of how to meet the needs of people in the present without compromising needs of people in the future!---is frequently seen as an obstacle to mitigating xRisk. This idea is remarkably widespread, coming from the mouths of bombastic Silicon Valley venture capitalists and mild-mannered Oxford philosophers alike. How can we work against such threats? In this course, we will bring together the approaches of demographers, conservation biologists, historians, anthropologists, and, yes, sustainability scientists to understand the extinction-level threats and, just as importantly, what we might do to mitigate them. We will ask questions like: How do species go extinct? How do people react when their groups are threatened with extinction? How do populations recover from near-extinction? What can we learn from the past and, more importantly, what can't the past tell us? Uncertainty, and how best to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, will play a major role in our exploration.