Existential Risk Research Quotes

“But there is a huge difference between, on one hand, admitting that there severe difficulties, and, on the other, throwing our hands in the air and fatalistically declaring the problem to be unsolvable. We don't know that they are in solvable until we tried, and tried really hard. Given the magnitude of what's at stake, just giving up on the problem is in my opinion unacceptable. The extent to which we are currently neglecting the problem is shocking. Nick Bostrom, in a recent paper, illustrates this with a diagram showing how the number of academic publications on snowboarding outnumbers those on risks of human extinction by a factor of 20 or so, while those on dung beetles beat those on snowboarding by another factor of 2. This should not be taken as a suggestion that too much effort is spent on academic studies of snowboarding and dung beetles, but rather as an indication that current efforts into the study of existential risks to humanity could easily be significantly scaled up without major destruction to the current academic landscape as a whole.”
― Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity

“But there is a huge difference between, on one hand, admitting that there are severe difficulties, and, on the other, throwing our hands in the air and fatalistically declaring the problem to be unsolvable. We don't know that they are in solvable until we tried, and tried really hard. Given the magnitude of what's at stake, just giving up on the problem is in my opinion unacceptable. The extent to which we are currently neglecting the problem is shocking. Nick Bostrom, in a recent paper, illustrates this with a diagram showing how the number of academic publications on snowboarding outnumbers those on risks of human extinction by a factor of 20 or so, while those on dung beetles beat those on snowboarding by another factor of 2. This should not be taken as a suggestion that too much effort is spent on academic studies of snowboarding and dung beetles, but rather as an indication that current efforts into the study of existential risks to humanity could easily be significantly scaled up without major destruction to the current academic landscape as a whole.”
― Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity

“Without the more developed sense of history that only fully flourished in modernity - reflected in the notion of a future potentially utterly unlike the past - there is no room for thinking of perils or promises that outstrip present and past experience.”
― Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction