existential risk
English
Nuclear warfare is an example of an existential risk.
Etymology
The "human extinction" sense was coined by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2002[1].
Noun
existential risk (countable and uncountable, plural existential risks)
- A hypothetical future event which could cause human extinction or permanently and severely curtail humanity's potential.
- 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks”, in Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković, editor, Global Catastrophic Risks, New York: Oxford University Press, →ISBN:
- The scenario of humanity going extinct in the next century is a disjunctive event. It could happen as a result of any of the existential risks we already know about—or some other cause which none of us foresaw.
- 2013 February, Nick Bostrom, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority”, in Global Policy, volume 4, number 1:
- But perhaps the strongest reason for judging the total existential risk within the next few centuries to be significant is the extreme magnitude of the values at stake.
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- A risk which could destroy or permanently damage an entity; a risk to one's existence.
- 2019 April 18, Gregory Travis, “How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer”, in IEEE Spectrum:
- In an industry that relies more than anything on the appearance of total control, total safety, these two crashes pose as close to an existential risk as you can get.
- 2020 March 30, “Tesla Faces Existential Risks”, in Seeking Alpha:
- I believe TSLA faces existential risk based on what is happening in the world today, and that this recent scare and economic recession will only catalyze further share price decline.
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References
- Phil Torres (January 21, 2015), “Problems with Defining an Existential Risk”, in Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, retrieved 2020-08-31: “The general concept has been around for decades, but the term was coined by Nick Bostrom in his seminal 2002 paper [...].”