Combination existential risks

Abstract

Existential risks are usually thought of as isolated events that can individually cause human extinction (e.g., superintelligence, pandemics, or asteroids). However, extinctions of non-human animals often involve many causes. This paper explores the possibility of “combination existential risks,” where several co-occurring events could lead to human extinction. Such risks could arise when multiple stressors act together to reduce human populations, when one event makes extinction possible that would not otherwise have occurred, or when two events are necessary for extinction to occur. Common examples are a nuclear war causing population decline that is then exacerbated by a pandemic, climate change leading to increased tensions that result in war, or a misaligned AI commissioning a lab to create a bioengineered pandemic. These risks highlight the importance of considering non-existential events that could become existential if combined with other risks, such as climate change or global catastrophic risks. – AI-generated abstract.