We should expect to worry more about speculative risks

Abstract

For a number of risks, when you first hear and think a bit about them, it’s reasonable to have the reaction “Oh, hm, maybe that could be a huge threat to human survival” and initially assign something on the order of a 10% credence to the hypothesis that it will by default lead to existentially bad outcomes. In each case, if we can gain much greater clarity about the risk, then we should think there’s about a 90% chance this clarity will make us less worried about it. We’re likely to remain decently worried about hard-to-analyze risks (because we can’t get greater clarity about them) while becoming less worried about easy-to-analyze risks.