I’m not positive which ones you mean, but if you mean things like famine prevention and climate change, then I think I disagree with you. I think that anything that triggers the collapse of civilization does constitute an extensional risk, because I think there is a significant chance that in a deep and total civilization collapse (on the scale of the fall of the Roman Empire, say) that humanity would never recover.
People in Europe survived the collapse of the Roman Empire because they were able to fall back on older iron-age technologies, which were good enough to keep a decent percentage of the people alive. But we are much farther away from those now, practical knowledge of how to survive without modern technology is much more rare, the environment is much more degraded, population would have to fall much faster, and in any case a collapse that large and that broad would have a significant risk of leading to a nuclear war or other catastrophe. I would say that there is at least a 10%-20% chance that a total collapse of civilization would lead to either human extinction or to humans never again reaching the current level of technology.
I’m not positive which ones you mean, but if you mean things like famine prevention and climate change, then I think I disagree with you. I think that anything that triggers the collapse of civilization does constitute an extensional risk, because I think there is a significant chance that in a deep and total civilization collapse (on the scale of the fall of the Roman Empire, say) that humanity would never recover.
People in Europe survived the collapse of the Roman Empire because they were able to fall back on older iron-age technologies, which were good enough to keep a decent percentage of the people alive. But we are much farther away from those now, practical knowledge of how to survive without modern technology is much more rare, the environment is much more degraded, population would have to fall much faster, and in any case a collapse that large and that broad would have a significant risk of leading to a nuclear war or other catastrophe. I would say that there is at least a 10%-20% chance that a total collapse of civilization would lead to either human extinction or to humans never again reaching the current level of technology.