Mega-risks that could drive us to extinction

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22534-megarisks-that-could-drive-us-to-extinction.html

Mega-risks that could drive us to extinction

17:26 26 November 2012 by Andy Coghlan

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.

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.

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