How Existential Risks Work

end of the world. So we decided to release this now, still in the thick of things, not just because the world hasn't ended, but because one of the few good things that's come out of this terrible time is the way that we've all kind of come together and given a lot of thought about how we can look out for each other. And that's exactly what thinking about existential risks is all about. So we thought there would be no better time than right now to talk about them.

We hope this explains things, uh and that you realize we're not releasing the glibly in anyway. Instead, we hope that it makes you reflective about what it means to be human and why humanity is worth fighting for. Welcome to Stuff. You should know a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and there's guest producer Dave c sitting in yet again,

at least the second time. I believe he's already picked up that he knows not to speak. He's nodding the custom established by Jerry Um. But yeah, he did not, didn't he? So yeah, I guess it is twice that Dave's been sitting in. What if he just heard two times from the other side of the room, You're like, didn't have the heart to tell him not to do that? Right? I think he would be Um, he would catch the drift from like the record scratching that just like materialized

out of nowhere. Many people know that we have someone on permanent stand by by a record player just in case we do something like that, and that person is Tommy Chong. Hi, Tommy, do I smell bong water man? Betty breaks of it? Yeah? Probably, so, I mean, hats off to him for sticking to his bit. You know. Cheech was like, hey, hey, I want a good long spot on Nash Bridges, So alls, whatever you want me to about, Like, I'm just into gummies now, Tommy Chong

like tripled down. Yeah, and least he sold the bongs, didn't he that? Uh? Pe test Beaters test beat Okay, suddenly think of how to say something like that away to um defeat urine test. Oh well, listen to you, fancy, I would say, I don't know. I know that a street guys call it pe Test Beaters, but Pete Test Beaters is a a band name about as good as say, like die your Planet. Actually I think diarrhea Planet's got

it beat. But still all right, so chuck, um, we're talking today about a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Existential risks, that's right, which I don't know if you if you've gathered that or not, but I really really am into this, this topic all all around. Um. As a matter of fact, I did a temporart series on it called The End of the World with Josh Clark, available everywhere you get podcasts right now. Um, I managed to smash that down. That's kind of what this is.

It's a condensed version and forever, like I wanted to just s y s k if I the topic of existential risks like do do it with you? I wanted to do it with you. This is going to be a live show at one point it was, Um, I think even before that, I was like, Hey, you want to do an episode on this. You're like, this is

pretty dark stuff. We're doing it now now. I The only time I said that was when you actually sent me the document for the live show and I went, I don't know about a live version of this, So I guess I guess that must have been before the end of the world. Then, huh, this was like eight years ago. Well, I'm glad you turned down the live show because it may have lived and died there. So Um, one of the have made all those into the world big bucks right exactly, Man, I'm rolling in it. My

mattress is stuffed with him. Um. So uh. And you know, bucks aren't always just the only way of qualifying or quantifying the success of something. You know, there's also Academy awards, right, oscars,

and that's it, peabodies, big money or public awards ceremonies. Okay, granted, Um, the other reason I wanted to do this episode is because one of the people who was a participant in Interviewee in the End of the World with Josh Clark, a guy named Dr Toby ord Um recently published a book called The Precipice and it is like a really in depth look at existential risks and the ones we face and you know what's coming down the pike and what we can do about him and why right exactly,

cheers and jeers right exactly. Um. And it's a it's a really good book and it's written just for like the average person to pick up and be like, I hadn't heard about this and then reached the end of it and say, I'm terrified, but I'm also hopeful. And that one reason I wanted to do this episode to let everybody know about Dr Ord's book or Toby's book. It's impossible to call him dr or he's just a

really likable guy. Um is because he actually turned the tone of the End of the World around almost single handedly. It was really grim, remember before I interviewed him, really and and also you remember I started like listening to The Cure a lot. Um just got real dark there

for a little while. Which is funny that The Cure is my conception of like really dark anyway, um, death metal guys out there laughing, right, so he but talking to him, he just kind of just steered the ship a little bit, and by the end of it, because of his influence, the End of the the World actually is a pretty hopeful well series. So my hat's off to the guy for for doing that, but also for writing this book the precipice. Hat's off, sir. So, um, we

should probably kind of describe what existential risks are. Um. I know that you know in this document is described many many times. But the reasons described many many times is because there's like a lot of nuance to it. And the reason there's a lot of nuance to it is because we kind of tend to walk around thinking that we understand existential risks based on our experience with

previous risks. But the problem with existential risks are they're actually new to us and they're not like other risks because they're just so big and if something happens one of these existential catastrophes but follows us, that's it. There's no second chance, there's no do over, and we're not

used to risks like that. That's right. Uh, nobody is because we are all people, right, and the thought of all of human beings being gone um or at least uh, not being able to live as regular humans live and enjoy life like and not live as matrix batteries because you know, technically the matrix those are people. Yeah, but that's that's no way to live. The people in the pods, Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I wouldn't want to live that way.

But that's another version of existential risk. Is not necessarily that everyone's dead, but you could become just a matrix battery and not flourish or move forward as a people, right exactly, so um. But but with existential risks in general, like that, the general idea of them is that like if you are walking along and you suddenly get hit by a car, like you no longer exist, but the

rest of humanity continues on existing, uh. Correct. With existential risks, it's like the car that comes along and hits not a human but all humans. So it's a risk to humanity itself. And that's just kind of different because all of the other risks that we've ever run across, um either give us the luxury of time or proximity, meaning that we have enough time to adapt our our behavior to it, to survive it and continue on as a species.

Or there's not enough of us in one place to be affected by this this UM risk that took out say one person or a billion people, Like if all of Europe went away, that is not an ex risk. No, and so people might say, um, it would be really sad, and I mean up to you know, the people alive on Earth, if they all died somehow, it would still possibly not be an existential risk because that one percent

living could conceivably rebuild civilization. That's right. We're talking about giving the world back to mother Nature and just seeing

what happens. Do you remember that UM series. I think it was a book to start the Earth without us m oh so, I think I know that there was a big deal when it came out, and then they made like a maybe a Science channel or that GEO series about it where this guy describes like how our infrastructure will start to crumble, like if humans just vanished tomorrow, how the Earth would reclaim, Nature would reclaim everything we've done and undo you know, after after a month, after

a year, after ten years. I've heard of that it's really cool stuff. Yeah, there's a Bonnie Prince. Billy my idol has a song called It's Far from Over, and that's sort of a Bonnie principally look at the fact that, hey, even if all humans leave, it's not over. Yeah, like new animals are gonna new creatures are going to be born, the earth continues. Yeah. Uh. And he also has a line though about like you, but you better teacher kids a swim. That's a great line. Yeah, it's good stuff.

They ever tell you. I saw that guy do karaoke with his wife once. Oh really, you know our friend Toby his wedding. Yeah, I would have not been able to be at that wedding because you would have just been such a fanboy. I don't know what I would do. I would, I would. It would have ruined my time, They really would, because I would second guess everything I did about talk. I mean I even talked to the

guy once backstage, and that ruined my day. It really did, because you spent the rest of the time just thinking about how stuff. It was actually fine. He was a very very very nice guy, and we talked about athens and stuff. But that's who I just went to see in d C Philly in New York. Nice when a little follow him around the tour for a few days, did he sing that song about the world going on on or life going on? He did so. Um, so let's just cover a couple of things that we like

people might think our existential risk that actually aren't. Okay. Yeah, I mean I think a lot of people might think, um, sure, some global pandemic that could wipe out humanity. There could very well be a global pandemic that could kill a lot of people, but it's probably not going to kill every living human, right. It would be a catastrophe, sure,

but not an next risk. Yeah, I mean, because humans have anybodies that we develop, and so people who survive that flu have anybodies that they pass on the next generation, and so that that disease kind of dies out before it kills everybody off, and the preppers at the very least they'll be fine, would be safe. Um, what about calamities like a mud slide or something like that. You can't mud slide the earth. You can't. And that's a

really good point. This is what I figured out in researching this, after doing the End of the World, after talking all these people. It took researching this article for me to figure this out. That it's time and proximity that are the two things that we used to survive, and that if you take away time and proximity, we're in trouble. And so mud slides are a really good example of proximity, where a mudslide can come down a

mountain and take out an entire village of people. Yes, and it's really sad and really scary to think of. I mean we saw it with our own eyes. We stood in a field that was now what like eight or nine feet higher than it used to be. Yeah, and you could see the trek. This is in Guatemala. When we went down to visit our friends at co ed Um, there was like the trees were much sparser, you could see the track of the mundon. They were like,

the people are still down there. This is It was a horrible tragedy and it happened in a matter of seconds. It just wiped out a village. But we all don't live under one mountain, and so if a bunch of people are taken out, the rest of us still go on.

So there's the time and there's a proximity yeah, I think a lot of people in the eighties might have thought, because of movies like war games and movies like The Day after that global thermon nuclear war would be an ex risk and as bad as that would be, it wouldn't kill every single human being. Uh no, No, they don't think so they started out thinking this. Like, as a matter of fact, nuclear war was the first one of the first things that we identify as a possible

existential risk. And if you kind of talk about the history of the field for the first like several decades, that was like the focus, the entire focus of existential risks. Like Bertrand Russell and Einstein wrote a manifesto about how we really need to be careful with these nukes because we're gonna wipe ourselves out. Carl Sagan, you remember our amazing Nuclear Winner episode that was from you know, studying

existential risks. And then in the nineties a guy named John Leslie came along and said, Hey, there's way more than just nuclear war that we could wipe ourselves out with. And some of it is taking the form of this technology that's coming down the pike. And that was taken up by one of my personal hero is a guy named Nick Bostrom. Yeah, he's a philosopher out of Oxford, and he is one of the founders of this field.

And he's the one that said, are one of the ones that said, you know, there's a lot of potential existential existential risks and nuclear wars peanuts bring it on. But and I know, I don't know of boss from specifically believes they probably does that that there we would be able to recover from a nuclear war. That's the idea, as you rebuild as a society after whatever zombie apocalypse, ri clear war happened. Yeah, and again say it killed off people. To us, that would seem like an unimaginable

tragedy because we lived through it. But if you zoom back out and look at the lifespan of humanity, not just the humans life today, but all of humanity, like it would be a very horrible period in human history, but one we could rebuild from oversay ten thousand years to get back to the point where we were before the nuclear war. And so ultimately it's probably not an existential risk. Yeah, it's tough. This is a tough topic for people because I think people have a hard time

with that long of a view of things. And then whenever you hear uh the big Matt comparisons of you know, how long people have been around and how old the earth is and that stuff, it kind of hits home. But it's stuff for people living that live you eighty years to think about, Well, ten thousand years will be fine, and even like, um, you mean, when I was researching this, she brought this up a lot, like where do we stop caring about people that our descendants? You know, we

care about our children or our grandchildren. That's about I just care about my daughter, That's about it. That's where it is with the grandchildren. You have grandchildren yet? Yeah, but wait till they come along. Everything I've ever heard is that being a grandparents even better than being a parent. And I know some grandparents. Okay, let's say I'm not dead before my daughter eventually has a kid, if she wants to, I would care about that grandchild. But after that,

forget it. Yeah, my kids, kids, kids, who cares granded that's about That's about where it would like, I care about people in humanity as a whole. I think that's what you gotta do. You can't think about like your your eventual ancestors think you just got to think about people, right, Yeah, that's really help people you don't know. Now, it's kind of requisite to start caring about existential risks, to start thinking about people, not just well let's talk about it.

So Toby Ord made a really good point in his book The Precipice, right that you care about people on the other side of the world that you've never met. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, Like that happens every day, right, So what's the difference between people who live on the other side of the world that you will never meet and people who live in a different time that you

will never meet. Why would you care any less about these people human beings that you'll never meet, whether they live on the other side of the world at some time or in the same place you do, but at

a different time. I think a few I mean I'm not speaking for me, but I think if I were to step inside the brain of someone who thinks that, they would think like a it's a little bit of a self Um, it's a bit of an ego thing because you know, like, oh, I'm helping someone else, so that does something for you in the moment, Like someone right now on the other side of the world that maybe I've sponsored is doing good because of me. And I had a little kick out of it from Sally Struthers.

Yeah that does something. It helps he help with food on her plate. She still with us, I think so. I think so too. But I feel really bad if I certainly haven't heard any news of her death, people would talk about that and the record scratch would have just happened. Uh. So I think that is something too. And I think there are also sort of a certain amount of people that are just um that just believe

you're worm dirt. There is no benefit to the afterlife as far as good deeds and things, so like once you're gone, it's just who cares because it doesn't matter. There's no consciousness. Yeah, well that's I mean, if you if you were at all like piqued by that stuff, I would say, definitely read the precipice because like one of the best things that Toby does, and he does a lot of stuff really well, is describe why it matters,

because I mean, that's a philosopher after all. Um, so he says like this is why it matters, Like not only does it matter because you're you're keeping things going for the future generation, you're also continuing on with the previous generation built like who who are you to just be like, oh, were you just gonna drop the ball? No? I agree that's a very self centered way to look at things totally. But I think you're right. I think there are a lot of people who look at it

that way. So you want to take a break, Yeah, we can take a break now, and maybe we can dive into Mr Bostrom's or doctor I imagine Bostroms U Five different types? Are there? Five? No, there's just a few. Okay, a few different types of existential we can make up a couple of the addam net. Let's not stop, all right, Chuck. So, uh, one of the things you said earlier is that existential risk, the way we think of them typically is um that something happens and humanity has wiped out and we all

die and there's no more humans forever and ever. That's an existential risk. That's one kind, really, and that's the easiest one to grasp with, which is extinction. Yeah, and that kind of speaks for itself. Just like dinosaurs are no longer here, that would be us, Yes, and I think that's one of those other things too. It's kind of like how people walk around like, yeah, I know I'm going to die someday. But if you sat them down and you were like, do you really understand that

you're going to die someday? That they might start to panic a little bit, you know, and they realize I haven't actually confronted that, I just know that I'm going to die. Or if you knew the date, that'd be weird. It would be like a Justin Timberlake movie. Would that make things better? Or we're for humanity? I would say better? Probably, right.

I think it'd be a mixed bag. I think some people would be able to do nothing but focus on that and think about all the time they're wasting, and other people would be like, I'm gonna make the absolute most out of this. Well, I guess there are a couple of ways you can go, and it probably depends on when your data is. If if you found out your date was a ripe old age, you might be like, well, I'm just going to try and lead the best life

I can. That's great. If you find out you live fast and die hard at seven die harder, uh, you might die harder. You might be like screw it, or you might really ramp up your good works. It depends what kind of person you are. Probably and more and more I'm realizing is it depends on how you were raised to. You know, like we we definitely are responsible

for carrying on ourselves as adults. Like you can't just say, well, I wasn't raised very well or I was raised this way, so whatever, Like you have a responsibility for yourself and who you are as an adult. Sure, but I really feel like the way that you're raised to really sets the stage and put you on a path that's that can be difficult to get off of because it's so hard to see for sure, you know, because that's just normal to you because that's what your family was. Yeah,

that's a good point. So anyway, extinction is just one of the ways one of the types of existential risks that we face, a bad one. Permanent stagnation is another one, and that's the one we kind of mentioned. Um dance around a little bit, and that's like some people are around.

Not every human died and whatever happened, but um, whatever is left is not enough to either repopulate the world or to progress humanity in any meaningful way to rebuild civilization back to where it was, and it would be that way permanently, which is kind of in itself tough to imagine too, just like the genuine extinction of humanity is tough to imagine the idea of, well, there's still plenty of humans running around, how are we never going to get back to that place? And there's that may

be the most depressing one, I think. I think the next one is the most depressing. But that's pretty depressing. But one one example it's been given for that is like, let's say we say, um, all right, this climate change, we need to do something about that. So we undertake a geo engineering project that isn't fully thought out, and we end up causing like a runaway greenhouse gas effect and there's just nothing we can do to reverse course, and so we ultimately wreck the earth. That would be

a good example of permanent stagnation. That's right, This is this next one. So yes, agreed, permanent stagnation is pretty bad. I wouldn't want to live under that, But at least you can run around and like, um, do what you want. I think the total lack of personal liberty and the flawed realization one is what gets me. Yeah, they all

get me. Uh. Flawed realization is the next one, and that's Um, that's sort of like the matrix example, which is that there's technology that we invented that eventually makes us their little batteries and pods right basically, or there's just um, some someone is in charge, whether it's a

group or some some individual or something like that. It's basically a permanent dictatorship that we will never be able to get out from under because this technology we've developed, yeah, is being used against us, and it's so good at keeping tabs on everybody and squashing descent before it grows. There's just nothing anybody could ever do to overthrow it. And so it's a permanent dictatorship where um, we're not doing anything productive, we're not advancing, we're say, um, say,

it's like a religious dictatorship or something like that. Oh, anybody does is go to church and support the church or whatever, and that's that. And so what Dr Bostrom figured out is that there are there are fatest as

bad as death. There are possible outcomes for the human race that aren't are as bad as extinction that still live people alive even like in kind of a futuristic kind of thing, like the flawed realization Wine goes um, but that you wouldn't want to live the lives that those humans live, and so humanity has lost its chance of ever achieving it's true, its true potential. That's right, And that that those qualifies existential risks as well, that's right. They want to live in the matrix no at all,

or in a post apocalyptic um altered Earth. Yeah, the matrix basically like thunder of the Barbarian that's what I imagine with with the permanent stagnation. So, uh, there are a couple of big categories for existential risks, and they are either nature made or man made um. The nature ones we've uh you know there there's always been the threat that big enough um object hitting planet Earth could

do it, right, Like that's always been around. It's not like that's some sort of new realization, but it's just a pretty rare It's so rare that it's not likely. Right, All of the natural ones are pretty pretty rare compared to the human made ones. Yeah, Like I don't think science wakes up every day and worries about a comet or an asteroid or a meteor. No, and it's definitely worth saying that the better we get at scanning the heavens, the safer we are eventually when we can do something

about it. If we see this coming, what do we do? Just hit the gas and move the Earth over a bit? Since the right, Um, and there was nothing we can do about any of these anyway, So maybe that's also why science doesn't wake up worrying, right. Yeah, so you've got near earth objects, you've got celestial stuff like collapsing

stars that produce gamma ray births. And then even back here on Earth, like a supervolcanic eruption could conceivably put out enough soot that it blocks photosynthesis and showing that, yeah, sends us into essentially a nuclear winner too. That would be bad. But like you're saying, there's these are very rare and there's not a lot we can do about them now. Instead, the focus of people who think about existential risks, um, And there are like a pretty decent

handful of people who are dedicated to this now. Um, they say that the anthropogenic or the human made ones, these are the ones we really need to mitigate because they're human made, so they're under our control and um, they they they that means we can do something about them more than say a comment. Yeah. Yeah, but that's a it's a bit of a um double edged sword because you think, oh, well, it's since we could stop

this stuff, that's really comforting to know. But we're not. Right, Like, we're headed down a bad path in some of these areas for sure. So because we are creating these risks and not thinking about these things, in a lot of cases, they're actually worse even though we could possibly control them. It definitely makes it more ironic too, right. So, um, there are a few that have been identified, and there's probably more that we haven't figured out yet or haven't

been invented yet. But one of the big ones, just um, I think almost across the board, the one that existential risk analysts worry about the most is AI artificial intelligence. Yeah, and this is the most frustrating one because it seems like it would be the easiest one to uh not

stopping its tracks, but to divert along a safer path. Um. The problem with that is that people who have dedicated themselves to figuring out how to make that safer path, are coming back and saying this is way harder than we thought it was going to be to make the safer path. Yeah really yeah. And so at the same time, while people recognize that there needs to be a safe path for AI to follow, this other our path that it's on now, which is known as the unsafe path,

that's the one that's making people money. So everybody's just going down the unsafe these other people are trying to figure out the safer one because the UM the computer and war games would say, maybe the best option is to not play the game, and that's if there is no safe option, then maybe a I should not happen or we need to And this is almost heresy to say we need to put the brakes on AI development so that we can figure out the safer way and

then move forward. But we should probably explain what we're talking about was safe in the in the first place, right, Yeah, I mean, we're talking about creating super intelligent AI that basically is is so smart that it starts to self learn UM and is beyond our control and it's not thinking, Ah, wait a minute, one of the one of the things I'm programmed to do is make sure we take care of humans. And it doesn't necessarily mean that some AI is going to become super intelligent and say I want

to destroy all humans. That's actually probably not going to be the case. It will be that this super intelligent AI is carrying out whatever it was programmed to do, would disregard humans exactly. And so if our goal of staying alive and thriving UM comes in conflict with the goal of whatever this AI's goal is, whatever it was designed to do, we would lose that because it's smarter than us. By definition, it's smarter than us. It's out

of it, it's out of our control. And probably one of the first things it would do when it became super intelligent is figure out how to prevent us from turning it off. Well, yeah, that's the fail safe, is the all important failsafe that the AI could just disable exactly right. You can just like sneak up behind it with a screwdriver or something like that, and then you can get shot the robots like in a robot voice.

So that's called UM designing friendly or aligned a I and people I have are like some of the smartest people in the field of AI research. Have have stopped figuring out how to build AI and have started to figure out how to build friendly AI. Yeah. Aligned is in aligned with our goals and needs and desires. And Nick Bostrom actually has a really great um thought experiment about is called the paper clip problem. Yeah. Um, and it's it's you can hear it on the end of

the world. Nice. I like that driving listeners. The next one is nanotech. Um. And nanotech is I mean, it's something that's very much within the realm of possibility, as is AI. Actually it's not. That's not super far fetched either by super intelligent AI. Yeah, it's definitely possible. Yeah,

and that's the same with nanotechnology we're talking about. And I've seen this everywhere, from um, little tiny robots that will just be dispersed and clean your house, um, to like the atomic level where they can like reprogram our body from the inside, the little tiny robots that can clean your car. Yeah. Those are those are the three. Those are three things, so um, two of them are cool.

One of the one of the things about these nanobots is that because they're so small, they'll be able to manipulate matter on like the atomic level, which is like the usefulness of that is mind bottling to send them in and they're gonna be networked, so we'll be able

to program to do whatever and control them. Right. Um. The problem is is if they're networked in there under our control, if they fall under the control of somebody else or say a super intelligent AI, then we would have a problem because they can rearrange matter on the atomic level, so who knows what they would start rearranging that we wouldn't want them to rearrange. It's like that Gene Simmons sci fi movie in the eighties. Uh, I won't say it was Looker. No. I always confuse those two,

the other one this is Runaway, Runaway. I think one inevitably followed the other on HBO. They had to have been a double feature because they could not be more linked. In my mind. Same here, you know. I remember Albert Finney was in one. I think he was in Looker he was, and Gene Simmons was in Runaway as the bad guy, of course, but it did a great job, and Tom Selleck was the good guy. Tom Selleck. Yeah,

but the idea in that movie was not nanobots. They were, but they were a little um insect like robots that they just weren't nano sized, right, And so the reason that these could be so dangerous is because not their size. But there's just so many of them. And while they're not big and they can't like punch you in the face or stick you in the neck with a needle or something like the runaway robots, they can do all sorts of stuff to you molecularly, and you would not

want that to happen. Yeah, this is pretty bad. There's an engineer out of m my Tea named Eric Drexler. He is a big, big name in molecular nanotech. He if he's listening right now. Right up to when you said his name, he was just sitting there saying, please don't mention me, no, because he's tried to back off from his gray goo hypothesis. So, yeah, this is the idea.

What there are so many of these nano bots that they can harvest their own energy, that can self replicate like a little bunny rabbits, and that there would be a point where there was runaway growth such that the entire world would look like gray goo because it's covered with nanobots. Yeah, and since they can harvest energy from the environment, they would eat the world, they'd wreck the world. Basically,

this is that's a that's scary, you're right. So he took so much flak for saying this, even because apparently it's scared people enough back in the eighties that nanotechnology was like kind of frozen for a little bit. Yeah, and so everybody went drux lure. And so he's backed off from it, saying like, this would be a design flaw, this would just naturally happen with nanobots. You'd have to design them to harvest energy themselves and to self replicate,

and so just don't do that. And so the thing is like, yes, he took a lot of flak for it, but he also like it was a contribution to the world. He pointed out two big flaws that could happen that now we're just like a sci fi trope. But when he when he thought about them, they weren't self evident or obvious. Yeah. I mean, I feel bad we even said his name, but it's worth saying. Clyde Drexler, right, Glad, that's right. Biotechnology is another pretty scary field. Um. There

are great people doing great research with infectious disease. UM. Part of that, though, involves developing new bacteria and new viruses, new strains that are even worse than the pre existing ones as part of the research. And that is, uh, that can be a little scary too, because I mean it's not just stuff of movies. There are acts, events that happen, protocols that aren't followed, and this stuff can or could get out of a lab. Yeah, and it's not one of those like could get out of a lab.

Even things that has gotten out of it happens, I don't want to say routinely. Dis happened so many times that when you look at the track record of the biotech industry, it's just like, how are we not all dead right now? It's crazy lost broken arrows, lost nuclear

warhead exactly, but with little, tiny, horrible viruses. And then when you factor in that terrible track record with them actually altering viruses in bacteria to make them more deadly, to do those two things to reduce the time that we have to get over them right, so they make them more deadly, um, and then to reduce proximity to make them more easily spread, more contagious, so they spread more quickly. And kill more more quickly as well. Then

you have potentially an existential risk on your hand. For sure. We've talked in here a lot about the Large Haydrin Collider. We're talking about physics experiments as the I guess this is the last example that we're going to talk about. Yeah, and I should point out that this is not physics experiments. Does not show up anywhere in Toby Ord's precipist book. Okay, this one is kind of my pet. Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of people who agree that this is a possibility,

but a lot of existential risks. Theorists are like, I don't know. Well, you'll explain it better than me. But the idea is that we're doing all these experiments, uh like the large Adreing Collider to try and figure stuff out we don't understand and which is great, but we don't exactly know where that all could lead. Yeah, because we don't understand it enough, you can't say this is

totally safe. And so if you read some physics papers and this isn't like Rupert Sheldrake Morphick Fields kind of like right, it's it's actual physicists have said, well, actually using this version of string. Are it's possible that this could be created in a large hadron collider or more likely a more powerful collider that's going to be built in the next fifty years or something like that. Super large. Sure,

the Duper, I think it's the nickname for it. Oh man, I hope that doesn't end up being the nickname the Duper, right, Yeah, I guess so. But it also has a little kind of you know, I don't know, I like it all right, So um, they're saying that a few things could be created accidentally within one of these colliders when they smashed

the particles together. Microscopic black hole. Uh, my favorite, the low energy vacuum bubble, which is it's a little tiny version of our universe that's more stable, like a more stable version, a lower energy version, and so if it were allowed to grow, it would grow at the speed of light. It would overwhelm our universe and be the new version of the universe. Yeah. That's like when you buy the baby alligator or the baby constrictor python. You think is so cute, right, and then it grows up

and eats the universe screwed. The problem is, is this new version of the universe is set up in a way that's different than our version, and so all the matter, including us, that's arranged just so for this this version of the universe would be disintegrated in this new version. So it's like the snap. But can you imagine if all of a sudden, just a new universe grew out a large hadron clider accidentally and at the speed of light just ruined this universe forever, If it was we

just accidentally did this with a physics experiment. I find that endlessly fascinating and also hilarious, just the idea I think the world will end ironically somehow. It's it's entirely possible. So, uh, maybe before we take a break, let's talk a little bit about climate change, because a lot of people might think climate change is an existential threat. Uh, you know, it's terrible and we need to do all we can, but even the worst case models probably don't mean an

end the humanity as a as a whole. Like it means we're living much further inland than we thought we ever would, and we maybe are much tighter quarters than we ever thought we might be in a lot of people might be gone, but it's probably not going to

wipe out every human being. Yeah, it'll probably end up being akin to that same that same line of thinking, the same path of Um, A catastrophic nuclear war, which I guess you could just say nuclear war catastrophic is kind of built into the idea, but we would be able to adapt and rebuild. Um, it's possible that our worst case scenarios are actually better than what will actually happen. So it's just like with a total nuclear war, it's possible that it could be bad enough that it could

be an existential risk. It's possible climate change could end up being bad enough that it's an existential voice. But from current understanding, they're probably not existential risks, right, all right, Well that's a hopeful place to leave for another break, and we're gonna come back and finish up with why all of this is important. It should be pretty obvious, but we'll summarize it. Stop you know, stop, stop, you know, stop,

you know, okay, chuck um. One thing about existential risks that people like to say is well, let's just not let's just not do anything. And it turns out from people like Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord and other people around the world who are thinking about this kind of stuff. If we don't do anything, we probably are going to accidentally wipe ourselves out. Like doing nothing is not a

safe option. Yeah, But um Bostrom is one who has developed a concept that's hypothetical called technological maturity Um, which is it would be great and that is sometime in the future where we have invented all these things, but we have done so safely and we have complete mastery over it all, there won't be those accidents, there won't be the gray goo, there won't be the AI that's not aligned. Yeah, because we'll know how to use all this stuff. Says right, like you said, right, we're not

mature in that way right now. No, Actually, we're at a place that Carl Sagan called their technological adolescence, where we're becoming powerful, but we're also not wise. At the point where we're right now technological adolescence where we're starting to invent the stuff that actually can wipe humanity out of existence. But before we reach technological maturity, where we have safely master and have that kind of wisdom to use all this stuff, that's probably the most dangerous period

in the history of humanity. And we're entering it right now. And if we don't figure out how to take on these existential risks, we probably won't survive from technological adolescents all the way to technological maturity. We will wipe ourselves out one way or another. Because this is really important to remember. All it takes is one one existential catastrophe, and not all of these have to take place. It

doesn't have to be some combination, just one. Just one um bug with basically a percent mortality has to get out of a lab. Just one accidental physics experiment has to slip up um just one AI has to become super intelligent and take over the world like just one of those things happening, and then that's it. And again the problem with existential risks that makes them different is we don't get a second chance. One of them befalls us,

and that's that. That's right. Uh, there depends on who you talked to about if you want to get in, maybe just a projection on our chances as a whole as humans. Uh Toby ord right now is uh what a one and six chance over the next hundred years. Yeah, he always follows that with Russian roulette, other people say about ten percent. Um. There's some different cosmologists. There's one name Lord Martin Rees who puts it att Yeah. He actually is a member of the Center for the Study

of Existential Risk. And we didn't mention before. Bostrom founded something called the Future of Humanity Institute, which is pretty great f h I. And then there's another one more place that I gotta want to shout out. It's called the Future of Life Institute. It was founded by Max tag Mark and Yon Talling, co founder of I think Skype. Oh really, I think so all right, well you should probably also shut out the Church of Scientology. No, no, no,

no genius. Yeah, that's the one that's one thinking about. Well, they get confused a lot. This is a pretty cool little um thing you did here with how long because I was kind of talking before about the long view of things and how long humans have been around. So I think your rope analogy is pretty spot on here. So that's J. L. Schellenberg's rope analogy. Well, I didn't think he wrote it. I wish it were admitting that

you included it. So the what we were talking about, like you were saying, is like it's it's hard to take that long view. But if you if you step back and look at how long humans have been around. So Homo sapiens have been on Earth about two thousand years, it seems like a very long time. It does. And even modern humans um like us have been around for about fifty thousand years, it seems like a very long

time as well. But if you think about how much longer the human race, humanity could continue on to exist as a species, UM, it's that's nothing. It's virtually insignificant um. And J. L. Schellenberg puts it like this, like, let's say humanity has a billion year lifespan, and you translate that billion years into a twenty foot rope. That's easy to show up with just the eighth of an inch mark on that twenty ft rope. You would have to our species would have to live another three hundred thousand

years from the point where we've already lived. Yes, we would have to live five hundred thousand years just to show up as an eighth of an inch that first eighth of an inch on that twenty ft long rope. That's how long humanity might have ahead of us. And

that's actually kind of a conservative estimate. Some people say, once we reach technological maturity, we're we're fine, We're not going to go extinct because we'll be able to use all that technology like having a I track all those new Earth objects and say, well, this one is a little close for comfort, I'm gonna send some nanobouts out to disassembl it. We will remove ourselves from the risk of ever going extinct when we hit technological maturity. So

a billion years is definitely doable for us. Yeah, and it's uh, why we care about it is because it's happening right now. I mean, there is already a I that is unaligned. Um, we are, We've already talked about the biotech in labs. Accidents have already happened, have been all the time, and there are experiments going on with physics that we we think we know what we're doing, but accidents happen, and an accident that you can't recover from, you know, there's no whoops is let me try that again,

right exactly because we're all toasts. So this is why you have to care about it. And luckily, um, I wish there were more people that care about it. Well, it's becoming more of a thing and if you talk to Toby Ord, he's like, so, just like say, the environmental movement was, you know, the the moral push, and we're starting to see some some stuff some results from that now, but stay starting making the sixties and seventies, nobody had ever heard of that. Yeah, I mean it

took decades. He's saying, like, we're about that's what we're doing now with existential Chris. People are going to start to realize like, oh man, this is for real, and we do something about it because we could live a billion years if we managed to survive the next hundred, which makes you and me chucking, like all of us alive right now in one of the most unique positions

any humans ever been at. We have the entire future of the human race basically resting in our hands because we're the ones who happened to be alive when humanity entered its technological adolescence. Yeah, and it's a it's a tougher one then save the planet, because it's such a tangible thing when you talk about pollution, and it's very easy to put on a TV screen or in a classroom. Um, and it's not so easily dismissed because you can see

it in front of your eyeballs and understand it. This is a lot tougher education wise, because, um people, here's something about nanobots and gray goo or ai and just think, come on, man, that's the stuff of movies. Yeah, And I mean that's it's sad that like we couldn't dig into it further, because when you really do start to break it all down and understand it, it's like, no, this totally is for real and it makes sense, like this is entirely possible and maybe even likely. Yeah, and

not the hardest thing to understand. It's not like you have to understand nanotechnology to understand its threat, right exactly. That's well put. The other thing about all this is that not everybody is on board with this, even people, even people who hear about this kind of stuff are like, no, you know, this is pie in the sky. It's overblown or the opposite of the sky. It's a cake in the ground. Is that the opposite dark sky territory? It's a turkey drumstick in the earth. Okay, that's kind of

the opposite of the of a pie. Okay. I think I may have just come up with a coloaquialism I think so. Um, So, some people aren't convinced. Some people say, no, AI is nowhere near being even close to human level intelligent,

let alone super intelligent. It like, why spend money because it's expensive, right, Well, and other people are like, yeah, if you start diverting, you know, research into figuring out make AI friendly, I can tell you China and India aren't going to do that, and so they're going to leap frog ahead of us and we're going to be toast competitively. So there's a cost to an opportunity cost, there's an actual cost um So there's a lot of people.

It's basically the same arguments for people who argue against mitigating climate change. Yeah, same same thing kind of. So the answer is, uh, terraforming, terraforming, Well, that's that's not the answer. The answer is one of those right, study terraforming is right. The answer is to study this stuff

figure out what to do about it. But it wouldn't hurt to learn how to live on Mars, right or just off of Earth because in the exact same way, like um that, like a whole village is at risk when it's under a mud slide or a mountain and a mud slide comes down. If we all live on Earth. If something happens to life on Earth, that's it for humanity. But if they're like a thriving population of humans who don't live on Earth, who live off of Earth, if

something happens on Earth, humanity continues on. So learning to live off of Earth is a good step in the right direction. That's plan A DOT one. Sure it's tied for first, like it's something we should be doing at the same time as studying and learning to mitigate existent tourists. Yeah, and I think it's got to be multi pronged, because the threats are multi pronged. Absolutely. And there's one other thing that I really think you've got to get across.

Like we said that, if if say the US starts to invest all of its resources into figuring out how to make friendly AI, but India and China continue on like the path, it's not gonna work. And the same goes with if every country in the world said, no, we're going to figure out friendly AI, but just one dedicate it itself to continuing on this path, the ninety

not the rest of the countries in the world. Progress would be totally negated by that one yeah, so we gotta get the It's got to be a global effort. It has to be a species wide effort, not just with AI, but with all these understanding all of them and mitigating them together. Yeah, that could be a problem. So, um, thank you for very much for doing this episode with me. I'll though you talking to Dave. No, well, Dave too.

We appreciate you to Dave, but but big ups to you Charles, because Jerry was like, I'm not sitting in that room. It's like, I'm not listening to Clark blather on about existential risk for an hour. Um, so one more time. Toby Ord's The Precipice is available everywhere you buy books. You can get The End of the World with Josh Clark wherever you get podcasts. If this kind of thing floated your boat, check out the Future of Humanity Institute the Future of Life Institute UM and they

have a podcast hosted by Aerial Kahn and UM. She had me on back in December of two eighteen as part of a group that was talking about existential hope. So you can go listen to that too. If you're like this is a downer, I want to think about the bright side, there's that whole Future of Life Institute podcast. So what about you? Are you like convinced of this whole thing like that this is an actual like thing

we need to be worrying about and thinking of. Really, No, I mean I think that, sure there are people that should be thinking about this stuff, and that's great as far as like me, what can I do well? And then I ran into that like, there's not a great answer for that. It's more like, start telling other people is the best thing that the average person can do. Hey, man, we just did that in a big way. We did, didn't We Like? It's people. Now we can go to sleep. Okay,

you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right? Well, then since Chuck said he's got nothing else, that's time for listener mail. Uh yeah, this is the opposite of all the smart stuff we just talked about. I just realized, Hey, guys, I love you, love stuff you should know. On a recent airplane flight, I listened to and really enjoyed the Coyote episode wherein Chuck mentioned aften wolf bait as a

euphemism for farts. Coincidentally, on that same flight, Uh, we're Bill Ny the Science Guy and Anthony Michael Hall, the actor. What is this star studded airplane flight? He said, so Naturally, when I arrived at my home, I felt compelled to watch rewatch the film Weird Science, in which Anthony Michael Hall stars in that movie, and I remember this now

that he mentions it. In that movie, Anthony Michael Hall uses the term wolf bait as a euphemism for pooping dropping a wolf bait, which makes sense now that it would be actual poop and not a fart. Did you say his name before? Who wrote this? No? Your friend who used the word wolf bait? Eddie at sure? Okay? So is Eddie like a big Weird Science fan or Anthony Michael Hall. I think he just Kelly Lebroc fan. Yeah, that must be it. Uh. It has been a full circle day for me and one that I hope you

will appreciate hearing about. And that is Jake Man. Can you imagine being on a flight with Bill Night and Anthony Michael Hall. Who do you talk to? Who do you hang with? I don't. I'd just be worried that somebody was gonna like take over control of the plane and fly it somewhere to hold us all hostage and make those two like perform or what if Bill Knight and Anthony Michael Holler Inca hoots maybe and they take

the plane hostage. Yeah, it would be very suspicious if they didn't talk to one another, you know what I mean? I think so? Who is that? That was Jake? Thanks Jake, that was a great email and thank you for joining us. If you want to get in touch with us, like Jake did, you can go onto stuff you Should Know dot com and get lost in the amazing nous of it. And you can also just send us an email to

stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H