Mega-risks that could drive us to extinction

The end is not nigh, but it could be unless we constrain our own technological ingenuity. That's the warning from an initiative in Cambridge, UK, that wants to create a centre to focus on huge, technological hazards that could wipe out the human race at a stroke.

These dangers would include robots that escape our control, nuclear war, doomsday plagues designed in laboratories, and devastation from climate change triggered by human activity.

"We're talking about threats to our very existence stemming from human activity," says Martin Rees, a professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. Along with Cambridge philosopher Huw Price and Jaan Tallinn, inventor of Skype, he has founded the Cambridge Project for Existential Risk.

Wrong focus

Rees says we focus too much on tiny risks that are widespread, such as trace contaminants in food, and too little on massive, one-off risks that could wipe us out. To counteract this, Rees, Price and Tallinn are proposing creating a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge.

"We don't think enough about low-probability, high-impact events, where one might be too many," says Rees. "The financial crash is a good example of something not predicted, and there will be other events of that type that have never happened before, but which we need to anticipate," he says. The centre would, hopefully, forestall our extinction by exploring how these mega-risks can be predicted and controlled.

AI threat

"We need to take seriously the possibility that there might be a 'Pandora's box' moment with artificial intelligence that, if missed, could be catastrophic," says Price. That critical point might come when computers can write their own programs, he says.

New concerns about "killer" robots also emerged last month in the US, where the non-governmental organisation Human Rights Watch released a report entitled Losing humanity: the case against killer robots.

"Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far," says Steve Goose of Human Rights Watch.

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