One of the most prominent intellectual attempts to grapple with human extinction in recent decades is existential risk studies.
Humanity’s Endgame
A new history of societal collapse by an expert in existential risk argues that our globalized society is edging toward the precipice.
From risk to flourishing: Seeds for responding to a complex world
Flourishing is the actualization of all beings toward their good -- not only individually but collectively, answering the question of `how do we live well with and for each other?'. In science as in society, the tendency to reduce, segregate, specialize, and settle has precluded embracing the concept of flourishing as a guiding principle. We aim to identify an approach to risk science research that promotes the flourishing of socio-ecological-technological systems (SETS). We discuss the normative role of an orientation toward flourishing for the field of risk science. We explore the possibility that (risk) science could be done in a way that is capable of pointing society toward a different future, one more resilient and more capable of flourishing. Our exploration mirrors the conversational nature of flourishing itself: examine ideologies traditionally believed to be rigidly in opposition and consider what emerges in the space(s) and conversation between them. We call this a dialectical approach. Within this paradigm grounded in conversation, pluralism, and pragmatism, we revisit three longstanding tensions in risk science: physical$|$social, determinism$|$uncertainty, contextuality$|$generality. Although these tensions are not new, revisiting them together through the lens of complexity science, and with explicit attention to the normative commitments that shape risk research, reveals underexplored possibilities for the field. Examining them in conversation with the other allows us to explore the provisional seeds for what might be termed complex risk science: interdependence, responsivity, participation, pluralism, openness, and ongoingness. Enacting the dialectical paradigm towards a risk science for a flourishing world will depend on creating collectives toward complex risk science, supporting them with skillfully governed commons, and centering care in our research.
Opinion | An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive. (Published 2025)
Everything is under threat. What you care about can make it to the other side.
Calamity Theory
What are the implications of how we talk about apocalypse? A new philosophical field has emerged. “Existential risk” studies any real or hypothetical hum...
The Extinction Risk Preference Cascade: Quotes
These are quotes from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google employees, in the wake of Jacob Coxon’s warnings, in which the employees confirm that they think AI might soon kill everyone.
On the Extinction Risk from Artificial Intelligence
In this report, RAND researchers examine the threat of human extinction posed by artificial intelligence (AI). Using a scenario-based analysis to evaluate three technologies — nuclear weapons, pathogens, and geoengineering — they found that it would be immensely challenging for AI to create an extinction threat, although they could not rule out the possibility. They identify risk indicators and make recommendations to mitigate future risk.
Pluralistic: A world without people (05 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
To be a billionaire is to be a solipsist – to secretly believe that (most) other people don't really exist – otherwise, how could you live with the knowledge that your farcical wealth and power springs from the agony you have inflicted on whole populations?
A world in turmoil: governing risk, establishing order in humanitarian crises
This special issue of Disasters on humanitarian governance focuses on risk and order. Its contributions show the tensions between humanitarian normative ideals and practical consequences, as many of ...
Effective Altruism Funded the “AI Existential Risk” Ecosystem with Half a Billion Dollars
The “AI Existential Safety” field did not arise organically. Effective Altruism invested $500 million in its growth and expansion.
'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
The 86-year-old social scientist says accepting the impending end of most life on Earth might be the very thing needed to help us prolong it
Effective Altruism: doing transhumanism better
Effective Altruism (EA) is a Trojan horse for transhumanism, through which EA movement leaders and funders aim to naturalize transhumanism as the logical extension of the existing global aid and development sector. This paper traces transhumanism's mainstreaming, first via its rebranding as a humanitarian effort to save lives, protect vulnerable populations, and ensure global flourishing (what I term transhumanitarianism), and later by embedding transhumanitarianism in EA (now under the rubric of longtermism). A key component of this strategy was inverting transhumanism's techno-optimism to instead focus on safety and preventing existential risks ( x-risk ) from emerging technologies like AI and biotechnology, while simultaneously advocating for the creation of these same technologies. The paper focuses on some components of this strategy: the use of inoculation, speculative ethics, anticipatory governance, and the mobilization of apocalyptic discourse as means for producing material outcomes in the form of policy and research agendas.
The Real Existential Risk Is AI CEOs Avoiding Oversight: “Alternative Nobel” Winner Timnit Gebru
We speak to the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind the global buildup of artificial intelligence. “Instead of discussing faulty, unreliable systems,” Gebru says tech leaders like SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are “marketing their systems as all-knowing, superpowerful, superintelligent,” and lobbying for “self-policing and self-regulation” to avoid being held “liable through existing laws.” Gebru expresses skepticism over increasingly widespread claims that AI algorithms pose an existential risk to humanity, warning that such claims are overblown and that “what is actually happening is regulatory capture.”
The shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history and us
Dissecting the new theoretical buzzword of the "Anthrop…
Leave Tyrants in the Ground
By unhooking ourselves from fossil fuels, we release ourselves from a world of harm.
Haitian Immigrant’s Tragic Death Shines a Light on the Human Cost of Ending Temporary Protected Status – The Root