existential risk
Civilization-ending danger
An existential risk is a potential catastrophe severe enough to permanently curtail humanity's future or cause human extinction.
The term gained currency in discussions of nuclear war, artificial intelligence, pandemics, and climate change—threats whose worst-case scenarios could end civilization or the species entirely.
Unlike ordinary risks, existential risks cannot be recovered from: Researchers argue that asteroid impact represents a genuine existential risk.
The field of existential risk studies attempts to identify and mitigate such threats.
- climate changePlanetary atmospheric transformation
- apocalypseTotal civilizational collapse
- end timesProphesied apocalyptic conclusion
- extinctionComplete vanishing of a species
- humanityPeople as a whole
nuclear war · catastrophe · annihilation · ruin · disaster · survival · societal collapse · eschatology · civilization · bioethics · asteroid impact · countdown · point of no return · doomsday · transhumanism · nuclear proliferation · oblivion · nanotechnology
- AI conceptsneural network, artificial general intelligence, neural net, superintelligence, CNN
- Nuclearnuclear reactor, atomic bomb, nuclear energy, atomic bombs, uranium
- AI ethicsalgorithmic bias, robot rights, AI rights, moral agency, human oversight
- AI safetymisalignment, superintelligence, stop button, power seeking, self-preservation
- foresightforesight, precognition, futurology, forethought, premonition
- dangerous secretsforbidden knowledge, leaked secrets, state secrets, nuclear secrets, trade secrets
existential riskhuman flourishing
Optimal living and wellbeing
technological utopia · golden age · utopia · human potential · abundance
risk, exist, risky, existence, existing, existential, exists, nonexistent, existed