The Uncertain Future of Humanity
EBS 10SC
How likely do you think it is that humans will survive the 21st century? What about the next thousand or ten thousand years? Existential threats to the persistence of the human species are called xRisks, and since the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in xRisks has jumped.
What might be the biggest threat to humanity? The great xRisk of the twentieth century, of course, was nuclear annihilation. While this remains a very real threat, most of the recent energy in the xRisk space has focused on dramatic technological threats such as runaway artificial intelligence and bioengineered pathogens. For some reason, the threats of climate change and natural pandemics are typically downplayed by the xRisk crowd. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the very concept of sustainability---literally the study of how to meet the needs of people in the present without compromising needs of people in the future!---is frequently seen as an obstacle to mitigating xRisk. This idea is remarkably widespread, coming from the mouths of bombastic Silicon Valley venture capitalists and mild-mannered Oxford philosophers alike.
How can we work against such threats? In this course, we will bring together the approaches of demographers, conservation biologists, historians, anthropologists, and, yes, sustainability scientists to understand the extinction-level threats and, just as importantly, what we might do to mitigate them. We will ask questions like: How do species go extinct? How do people react when their groups are threatened with extinction? How do populations recover from near-extinction? What can we learn from the past and, more importantly, what can’t the past tell us? Uncertainty, and how best to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, will play a major role in our exploration.
Meet the Instructor
James Holland Jones
Professor of Environmental Social Sciences and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment
Jamie Jones is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Social Sciences in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. His research interests include human adaptability, human ecology and population biology, and social networks. He did his undergraduate work at New College (RIP) in Sarasota, Florida and his Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington in Seattle in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, and the Center for AIDS and STD. Jamie is a founding member of the Department of Environmental Social Sciences in SDSS and is very active in advocating for understanding the human dimensions of global change and sustainability. Jamie is always happy to talk about science fiction, environmental justice, weird facts about nature and evolution (especially parasites and other infectious agents), and Effective Altruism, Longtermism, and Rationalism more generally (just prepare for an earful).