MichaelA🔸 comments on Some thoughts on Toby Ord’s existential risk estimates

[MichaelA🔸]

Something I’ve just realised I forgot to mention in reply: These are estimates of existential risk, not extinction risk. I do get the impression that Ord thinks extinction is the most likely form of existential catastrophe, but the fact that these estimates aren’t just about extinction might help explain at least part of why they’re higher than you see as plausible.

In particular, your response based on it seeming very unlikely an event could kill even people in remote villages etc. is less important if we’re talking about existential risk than extinction risk. That’s because if everyone except the people in the places you mentioned were killed, it seems very plausible we’d have something like an unrecoverable collapse, or the population lingering at low levels for a short while before some “minor” catastrophe finishes them off.

This relates to Richard’s question “Are you suggesting that six people could repopulate the human species?”