Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Let’s take a step back in time, back to 1900. I imagine that, if you were alive then, you would say that the risk of human extinction in the next hundred years would be fairly low. But then in the ’40s, we had the shock where we developed nuclear weapons, and suddenly, I think we would both agree, the risk of human extinction or the collapse of civilization went up quite substantially because, for the first time, we had the ability for one person or one country to basically wipe out most humans alive at the time. What do you think are the chances that, in the 21st century, there’ll be some new breakthrough that’s analogous to nuclear weapons that will, again, give a level-shifting annual risk of human extinction? The possibility that worries me the most is simply an equivalent amount of power being more portable. I don’t think it has to be a new technology. It certainly might be, but simply the cost of a nuclear weapon or something like it being much cheaper. Bio weapons — they’re very hard to carry around and deploy, but you can quite readily imagine that becoming easier. It seems to me those are likely outcomes. But terrorism in general, I don’t think we understand well, so after 9/11, people thought there would be many more attacks. You could ask questions, “Why don’t they just send a few people over the Mexican border? They get here, they buy submachine guns, they show up in a famous shopping mall and they take out 17 people. They don’t get any further than that, but it’s a massive publicity event. And this just happens every two or three weeks.” A priori, it almost sounds plausible, but nothing like that has happened. If anyone has done that, it’s our native, white Americans who are not, in the traditional sense, terrorists. It’s clearly possible, but they don’t do it. So when you ask, how likely is someone to do something pretty horrible with a pretty cheap decentralized, highly destructive technology? We don’t even see them acting at the current frontier of destructiveness. What you need in terms of people who are competent enough, motivated enough, coherent enough, have a base to operate from. How hard is it in a combinatorial sense for all those to come together? We don’t know, but I think thinking about it more, you become a little more optimistic rather than less. I think that’s fair, but it seems like over time, as our technology gets better, the number of people and the amount of expertise and the amount of security that you would need in order to pull off an operation like that is going down and down and down. Eventually, it could end up being a handful of people or even a single individual, and perhaps breakthroughs in biology are the most likely cause of that. Did you think, perhaps, that the annual risk of human extinction is going down or up? There’s varying factors here, and I guess, the improvement of technology in that sense is one thing that’s pushing it up. Though, I suppose we could also invent technologies that might give us the ability to prevent that from ever happening.…

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