EA - A Theologian's Response to Anthropogenic Existential Risk by Fr Peter Wyg

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Theologian's Response to Anthropogenic Existential Risk, published by Fr Peter Wyg on November 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Hi all,This is very much someone outside the bailiwick of this forum looking in, but I was told it could be interesting to share this article I wrote recently.I'm a Catholic priest, with a prior background in Electronic Engineering, currently working on a PhD in Theology at Durham University. I am researching how the Catholic Church can engage with longtermism and better play its, potentially significant, part in advocating existential security. I'm particularly interested in how a Christian imagination can offer unique evaluative resources for attributing value to future human flourishing and to develop a sense of moral connection with our descendents, better motivating the sacrifices safeguarding the future demands.Much of the material will be very familiar to you as the article was written for a Catholic publication, and so also serves to introduce and promote some of the basic ideas to a new audience.I'm certainly interested to receive any comments or questions!Called to Share the Father’s Love for Humanity’s Future:A Scriptural and Patristic Perspective on Eschatological Cooperation in the Age of Anthropogenic Existential RisksAs the 16th day of July 1945 came to a close, the sun set over a changed world. For the first time, humanity had detonated an atomic bomb, and after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year, society struggled to come to terms with the forces unleashed. Amidst the cacophony of devastation and the uproar of anti-nuclear movements, there were those who caught whispers of a dark threshold quietly crossed. One such thinker, Bertrand Russell, stood in the House of Lords to describe the shadow of a new kind of threat:We do not want to look at this thing simply from the point of view of the next few years; we want to look at it from the point of view of the future of mankind. The question is a simple one: Is it possible for a scientific society to continue to exist, or must such a society inevitably bring itself to destruction? ... As I go about the streets and see St. Paul's, the British Museum, the Houses of Parliament, and the other monuments of our civilization, in my mind's eye I see a nightmare vision of those buildings as heaps of rubble, surrounded by corpses.[1]Russell recognised that the development of nuclear weapons marked the dawn of a new age: humanity had become its greatest risk to itself. Adam and Eve, in eating the forbidden fruit, opened the way to individual death, but we have now “eaten more deeply of the fruit of the tree of knowledge” and are now “face to face with a second death, the death of mankind.”[2] An antithesis of God’s creatio ex nihilo, we have obtained our own absolutising power, the “potestas annihilationis, the reductio ad nihili.”[3]A philosophical response to this new power suggests that threat of nuclear apocalypse is but one example of a category of anthropogenic existential risks (AXRs). Other self-caused threats to humanity’s future potential also include engineered pandemics, human-caused climate change, and unaligned artificial intelligence, all of which could cause existential catastrophe. Further AXRs still await discovery, and we have no reason to believe these will be less hazardous.[4] Without action, the danger humanity creates for itself will continue to grow and Ord, from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, argues such increasing risk is unsustainable. We will either learn to mitigate existential risks or one of them will eventually play out, causing a permanent loss of humanity’s potential.In the past, survival could be taken for granted as natural threats to the human species are vanishingly rare on the timescale of human histo...