Hi! I’m slightly familiar with the literature on existential risk from having read the books What We Owe The Future and The Precipice a year ago as well as all of the 80k problem profiles over the last year. I remember being reasonably convinced by their arguments at the time, but I now feel a lot less confident about them so I figured I would share my thoughts with you guys. Currently, I think that the risk of extinction over the next hundred years is quite low (less than .01%) if AGI is not developed.

As far as I know, natural extinction risks and the risks of extinction from climate change are extremely unlikely. As such, this just leaves us with just the anthropogenic risks of pandemics, nuclear war, and unknown risks.

My primary reason for thinking existential risk is low is that, for these two existential risks, in order for humanity to survive, all we would need is literally a single biological woman safe in a bunker somewhere to have a large permanent store of male reproductive material and food. With this, it would be possible to re-populate the entire planet over a long enough time period.

It seems like, unless there is an agent which is actively seeking out every human on Earth and killing them or the Earth is literally unlivable for humans for thousands of years, we should expect a reasonably high chance that humanity survives via the use of bunkers.

This is the part where, perhaps, I'm very misinformed.

It seems like, if there were a pandemic, if the pandemic only infects humans, we should expect for everyone infected to die and then for the pandemic to go away. After this, people could just leave the bunkers and humanity would survive.

If the pandemic infected animals too and could easily pass from animals to humans, one could simply live in a hazmat suit and have their food disinfected before they eat it, in which case, humanity would still survive.

Lastly, it also seems like, if there were a nuclear war with a serious nuclear winter, we shouldn’t expect it to last more than like a hundred years, and, as such, we should expect Earth to eventually become livable for humans so that people can leave their bunkers.

If I had to guess the risk of extinction from unknown risk, I couldn’t see reasonably going higher than 10%.

What do you guys think about this perspective?