Can Learning About Extinction Make Us Feel More Optimistic About The Future?

What’s your p(doom)? 

That’s “probability of doom” to you or us.

It refers to the odds that artificial intelligence will cause a doomsday scenario. 

The scale runs from zero to 100, and the higher you score yourself, the more you think AI will wipe out humankind. 

Once an inside joke on internet message boards — and a popular icebreaker among techies in San Francisco — the metric has seeped into popular consciousness, becoming a marker for  “extinction panic”. 

Extinction panic is a collective or widespread fear about the possibility of human extinction.

Usually, it emerges during times of societal uncertainty, rapid technological change or geopolitical instability. 

For instance, there was a lot of it about in the 1920s — 

a time characterised by a pervasive sense humanity was on the brink of self-destruction. 

Why does that matter?

Well, understanding previous extinction panics can help us cope with current anxieties.

Following the 1920s, for example, human life and labour were not superseded by machines, as predicted.

(Or in the 1960s or the 1980s — two other flash-points in the development of AI.)  

Of course, that’s not to say we shouldn’t be alive to the dangers. 

But, it’s worth remembering — as far as foretelling doom goes — we humans don’t appear to be very good at it.

At least, our capacity for adaptation and survival has always managed to find solutions so far.