Wikipedia Says There’s A 19% Chance The Human Race Doesn’t Make It To 2100

I swear, it’s really hard not to be all doom-and-gloom when it comes to the state of the world. With a global pandemic and climate change currently messing with our lives as we speak, it’s easy to think this is the end-of-days. Well, Wikipedia apparently agrees. According to their page on global catastrophic risk, there’s a 19% chance that we won’t make it to the year 2100. And considering most people are now living well into their 90s and 100s, that means that people living right now would see the end of the world if that was true.

A global catastrophic event is anything that endangers or completely wipes out human civilization across the globe. This could be due to a gigantic asteroid, an unchecked pandemic, or the Yellowstone Caldera exploding. Rogue AI, war, famine–it’s all bad news. If it kills all or most of us, then it counts as a global catastrophic event.

While many of these examples make it seem like the end of the world would be out of our hands, there are still scientists who specialize in predicting this kind of disaster. And that’s where Wikipedia’s prediction comes from. It says:

Given the limitations of ordinary observation and modeling, expert elicitation is frequently used instead to obtain probability estimates. In 2008, an informal survey of experts at a conference hosted by the Future of Humanity Institute estimated a 19% risk of human extinction by the year 2100, though given the survey’s limitations these results should be taken “with a grain of salt”.

Global Catastrophic Risk, Wikpedia

While the actual paper citing these statistics doesn’t give a sample size for its survey, they do give percentages for the reasons why those surveyed thought the world would end by 2100. The top reason is a tie between people being killed by molecular nanotech weapons and those killed by superintelligent AI, both at 5%. The scientists surveyed clearly have a mistrust for new technology. (Can you blame them?)

Interestingly, only 2% of those surveyed considered an “engineered pandemic” and 0.05% for a “natural pandemic” as the reason for a global catastrophic event. Considering the survey was from a conference held in 2008, it’d be interesting to see if these percentages would be bigger for a survey taken in 2022.

The survey results go on to say:

There are likely to be many cognitive biases that affect the result, such as unpacking bias and the availability heuristic‒‐well as old‐fashioned optimism and pessimism.

Global Catastrophic Risks Survey

Let’s hope it’s the optimists who are correct.