X-Risk: Thinking About the End of the Human Race

This is a review of the book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction by Thomas Moynihan. I was expecting this book to be an exploration of how human beings seem to be continually drawn to creating the mechanisms of our own destruction. Whether it be be nuclear weaponry, machines which poison our atmosphere, or computers which will become hyper-intelligent in an instant, we always seem to head in the same direction. Why should this be so? I thought this book would help me figure it out. No such luck. “X-Risk” isn’t about any of these real world problems. It’s about the philosophical origins of these problems as written by famous Western thinkers over the last 400 years. If you don’t like abstract philosophy, this isn’t your book.

Here’s the core claim of the book: “the discovery of human extinction may well yet prove to have been the very centerpiece of that unfolding and unfinished drama that we call modernity. In discovering our own extinction, we realized that we must think ever better because, should we not, then we may never think again.” Fine. That’s an interesting topic to explore over the course of 400 plus pages. But if that florid, overweighted prose bothers you, hoo boy, you’re in for a slog because the whole style of this book is to say in 50 pages what could be said in five. An editor was sorely needed here to improve flow and readability.

Here’s a breakdown of the takeaways from the four main sections of the book.

Astrobiology

Beginning in the 1600s, Western philosophers experienced a growing awareness of outer space, other planets, and the stars beyond our own. Understanding the vastness of the cosmos led them to realize that humans are unlikely to appear again anywhere in the universe should we fail as a species, contrary to what earlier thinkers believed when they embraced the idea of plentitude, I.e., no lifeforms are ever truly extinguished, they simply rise again in time.

Geoscience

Discovery of the deep past through paleontology revealed that nature’s law is the same for men and animals: we’re no safer from extinction than the dinosaurs or any other creature that has ever lived on the earth. We lost our Special Place in the planetary order.

Forecasting the Future

When advanced mathematics were developed, people began to grasp the concept of deep time, that history is unimaginably long. When you can back-fit the past to precise equations, it makes it possible to predict certain aspects of the future. That power, previously unavailable, got people thinking about projecting into the distant future. Human extinction looks plausible in many projected scenarios like heat death, sun burnout, exhaustion of resources, etc. The future started to look a lot more threatening.

Omnicide

We got too smart. If we automate everything, we will become nothing but pleasure seekers, our thinking faculties will whither and die. Full automation will destroy our desire to continue to innovate and discover as we seek greater comfort. “Humans are vanishing into their machines.” Or we’ll become exclusive creatures of the mind and thought, abandoning the material world and external reality. All of these lead to human extinction.

Vocation

“The shock of extinction really hit when we realized that none of our ethical preferences were inherent in the natural world” which I take to mean “Enlightenment thinkers realized that there was no benevolent god coming to rescue us should we choose to do ourselves in.” This chapter is largely about all of the crackpot ideas for harnessing animals and the ecosystem to engineer some kind of paradise. Most of it seems silly because all of the ideas quoted are absurdly grandiose, obviously unworkable, or inadvisable. If the 20th century taught us anything, it’s that we don’t have the wisdom to engineer the planet to a state of perfection. If anything, the planet needs to be protected from our efforts in that direction. We always create unintended consequences.

The author finishes off be getting into really obtuse concepts like our “obligation” to work to "cosmically expand the domain of value”, “our duty to bring economy to nature,” and other philosophical claptrap which has little to do with Real Life. Many grand plans for human expansion into the universe (without regard for the physical impossibility of doing so) are described.