Four New Horsemen of an Apocalypse? Solar Flares, Super-volcanoes, Pandemics, and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

If economists have largely failed to predict or prevent the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, and the more disastrous economic collapse associated with the pandemic of 2020, what else is the profession missing? This is the question that motivates this survey. Specifically, we want to highlight four catastrophic risks – i.e., risks that can potentially result in global catastrophes of a much larger magnitude than either of the 2008 or 2020 events. The four risks we examine here are: Space weather and solar flares, super-volcanic eruptions, high-mortality pandemics, and misaligned artificial intelligence. All four have a non-trivial probability of occurring and all four can lead to a catastrophe, possibly not very different from human extinction. Inevitably, and fortunately, these catastrophic events have not yet occurred, so the literature investigating them is by necessity more speculative and less grounded in empirical observations. Nevertheless, that does not make these risks any less real. This survey is motivated by the belief that economists can and should be thinking about these risks more systematically, so that we can devise the appropriate ways to prevent them or ameliorate their potential impacts.

Could a Kilonova Kill: A Threat Assessment

“…Moreover, we recall that solar flares, while influencing a much smaller range than the abovementioned phenomena, have been known to disturb the atmosphere and interfere with modern-day technological infrastructure, which could threaten human lives. A recent such event was a power outage in Quebec in 1989 (Allen et al 1989), and the Carrington Event was a previous powerful solar event that led to fires along telephone wires (Carrington 1859; Loomis 1861; Lakhina et al 2004;Noy & Uher 2022). Riley & Love (2017) estimate that a similar event could occur within the next 100 yr, which could be devastating for current technology.…”

Extraterrestrial Artificial Intelligence: The Final Existential Risk?

“…Listing the many ways humanity can meet its end has become popular. Bostrom (2014Bostrom ( , 2013, MacAskill (2022), Noy and Uher (2022), Ord (2020) and Turchin and Denkenberger (2020) and are amongst scholars who have recently fuelled the apocalyptic zeitgeist by warning about the existential risks that humanity faces. The term "existential risk" was first used by Bostrom (2002), who defined it as a risk that an event "would either annihilate Earthoriginating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential" (Bostrom, 2002, p.2).…”