Continental Hotspot

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is rather dense. But I suppose you can’t not be thorough when you are trying to put a number on the literal end of humanity. Personally, having read all the arguments presented, I think this book is too pessimistic at times. Especially when it comes to the danger of AI misalignment. Almost all AI foom scenario’s rely on nigh magical undiscovered technologies at some point and I don’t see why an AI would have any advantage over humans discovering any of those. Just thinking fast won’t help you at all when trying to discover a blue diode let alone Von Neumann style nanotech. You’ll need a vast industrial base and endless experimentation which disembodied AI will be at a distinct disadvantage for.

On the other hand the risks of global climate change may in fact be understated because this book tries to assess only those risks which are truly catastrophic (as in actually going extinct catastrophic). This book does for example not assess the dangers of the global atmospheric circulation system with its three cells per hemisphere (Hadley, Ferrell and polar) reverting to its historic one cell if the Earth warms more than 3-4 degrees Celcius. This particular configuration is more stable at higher atmospheric temperatures and would so drastically alter the locations of all climate zones that we might as well just start over with mapping them. Luckily we are still nowhere near that kind of heating!

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Other work by Bostrom is excellent though. I particularly like his Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant which was animated in by CGP Grey here: