One terminology for this is introduced in “Governing Boring Apocalypses”, a recent x-risk paper. They call direct bad things like nuclear war an “existential harm”, but note that two other key ingredients are necessary for existential risk: existential vulnerability (reasons we are vulnerable to a harm) and existential exposure (ways those vulnerabilities get exposed). I don’t fully understand the vulnerability/exposure split, but I think e.g. nuclear posturing, decentralized nuclear command structures, and launch-on-warning systems constitute a vulnerability, while global-warming-caused conflicts could lead to an exposure of this vulnerability.
(I think this kind of distinction is useful, so we don’t get bogged down in debates or motte/baileys over whether X is an x-risk because of indirect effects, but I’m not 100% behind this particular typology.)
One terminology for this is introduced in “Governing Boring Apocalypses”, a recent x-risk paper. They call direct bad things like nuclear war an “existential harm”, but note that two other key ingredients are necessary for existential risk: existential vulnerability (reasons we are vulnerable to a harm) and existential exposure (ways those vulnerabilities get exposed). I don’t fully understand the vulnerability/exposure split, but I think e.g. nuclear posturing, decentralized nuclear command structures, and launch-on-warning systems constitute a vulnerability, while global-warming-caused conflicts could lead to an exposure of this vulnerability.
(I think this kind of distinction is useful, so we don’t get bogged down in debates or motte/baileys over whether X is an x-risk because of indirect effects, but I’m not 100% behind this particular typology.)