The fragile world hypothesis is the hypothesis that ‘if technological development continues indefinitely, systemic fragility will increase to the point that the possibility of a shock sufficient for complete collapse approaches certainty.’^[1]

Closely related to the concept of a ‘global polycrisis’:

Established concepts, such as “systemic risk” (Renn 2016; Renn et al. 2019), “catastrophic risk” (Bostrom and Ćirković 2008), or “existential risk” (Ord 2020) do not adequately highlight these crisis interactions, even though they do capture essential aspects of the phenomenon …

A global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.^[2]

An earlier version of the same paper^[3] described a global polycrisis as having three or more ‘systems of origin’ and involving ‘Irreversible and catastrophic degradation of humanity’s prospects’.

A weaker version of this hypothesis is that such a collapse isn’t inevitable, but is potentially as great an area of concern for longtermists as extinction, due to the ‘at a minimum, very difficult’ nature of even a single technological reboot^[4] combined with the possibility of an increasingly difficult series of collapses and recoveries^[5], and/​or due to the possibility of a collapsed-and-rebuilt society having much less benign values than our own.^[6]

The Seshat Databank is a repository of data used to predict possible paths to societal collapse.

Not to be confused with the vulnerable world hypothesis.

Further reading

Baum, Seth, Timothy M. Maher Jr. & Jacob Haqq-Misra (2013 Double Catastrophe: Intermittent Stratospheric Geoengineering Induced By Societal Collapse, Environment, Systems and Decisions, vol. 33, pp. 168-180

Bologna, Mauro & Gerardo Aquino (2020), Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis, Nature.

Brozović, Danilo (2023), Societal collapse: A literature review, Futures vol. 145.

Jebari, Karim (2019), Civilization Re-Emerging After a Catastrophic Collapse, EAGx Nordic presentation

Lawrence, Michael, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Scott Janzwood, Johan Rockstöm, Ortwin Renn & Jonathan F. Donges (2024) Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement, Global Sustainability vol. 7

Lynas, Mark, Probabilities of worst case scenarios, 80 000 Hours podcast

Mokyr, Joel (2000) King Kong and Cold Fusion: Counterfactual analysis and the History of Technology, in P. E. Tetlock, R. N. Lebow, & G. Parker (Eds.), Unmaking the West: ‘What-if?’ Scenarios that rewrite World History (pp. 277-322). University of Michigan Press.

Turchin, Alexey et al (2022) A Pin and a Balloon: Anthropic Fragility Increases Chances of Runaway Global Warming, Effective Altruism Forum

1. ^

   Manheim, David (2020) The fragile world hypothesis: complexity, fragility, and systemic existential risk, Futures, vol. 122, pp. 1–8.

2. ^

   Lawrence, Michael, Scott Janzwood & Thomas Homer-Dixon (2022) What Is a Global Polycrisis? And how is it different from a systemic risk? (version 2.0), published by the Cascade Institute

3. ^

   Lawrence, Michael, Scott Janzwood & Thomas Homer-Dixon (2022) What Is a Global Polycrisis? And how is it different from a systemic risk? (version 1.1), published by the Cascade Institute

4. ^

   Dartnell, Louis (2015) Out of the ashes, Aeon.

5. ^

   Maher, Timothy M. Jr. & Seth Baum Adaptation to and Recovery from Global Catastrophe, Sustainability, vol. 5, pp. 1461-1479

6. ^

   Townsend, Michael (2022) What We Owe The Future: A review and summary of what I learned—Lesson one: Today’s values could have easily been different, published on the Giving What We Can blog