Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

And speaking of panics, what do you think are the greatest threats to the human species? In the 1960s several thinkers advised that they were overpopulation, nuclear war, and boredom.⁸⁹ One scientist warned that although the first two might be survivable, the third definitely was not. Boredom, really? You see, as people no longer have to work all day and think about where their next meal is coming from, they will be at a loss as to how to fill their waking hours, and will be vulnerable to debauchery, insanity, suicide, and the sway of religious and political fanatics. Fifty years later it seems to me that we have solved the boredom crisis (or was it an epidemic?) and are instead experiencing the (apocryphal) Chinese curse of living in interesting times. But don’t take my word for it. Since 1973 the General Social Survey has asked Americans whether they find life “exciting,” “routine,” or “dull.” Figure 18-4 shows that over the decades in which fewer Americans said they were “very happy,” more of them said that “life is exciting.”

Figure 18-4: Happiness and excitement, US, 1972–2016

Source: “General Social Survey,” Smith, Son, & Schapiro 2015, figs. 1 and 5, updated for 2016 from https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/projects/15157/variables/438/vshow. Data exclude nonresponses.

The divergence of the curves is not a paradox. Recall that people who feel they lead meaningful lives are more susceptible to stress, struggle, and worry.⁹⁰ Consider as well that anxiety has always been a perquisite of adulthood: it rises steeply from the school-age years to the early twenties as people take on adult responsibilities, and then falls steadily over the rest of the life course as they learn to cope with them.⁹¹ Perhaps that is emblematic of the challenges of modernity. Though people today are happier, they are not as happy as one might expect, perhaps because they have an adult’s appreciation of life, with all its worry and all its excitement. The original definition of Enlightenment, after all, was “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.”

CHAPTER 19EXISTENTIAL THREATS

But are we flirting with disaster? When pessimists are forced to concede that life has been getting better and better for more and more people, they have a retort at the ready. We are cheerfully hurtling toward a catastrophe, they say, like the man who fell off the roof and says “So far so good” as he passes each floor. Or we are playing Russian roulette, and the deadly odds are bound to catch up to us. Or we will be blindsided by a black swan, a four-sigma event far along the tail of the statistical distribution of hazards, with low odds but calamitous harm.

For half a century the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse have been overpopulation, resource shortages, pollution, and nuclear war. They have recently been joined by a cavalry of more exotic knights: nanobots that will engulf us, robots that will enslave us, artificial intelligence that will turn us into raw materials, and Bulgarian teenagers who will brew a genocidal virus or take down the Internet from their bedrooms.

The sentinels for the familiar horsemen tended to be romantics and Luddites. But those who warn of the higher-tech dangers are often scientists and technologists who have deployed their ingenuity to identify ever more ways in which the world will soon end. In 2003 the eminent astrophysicist Martin Rees published a book entitled Our Final Hour in which he warned that “humankind is potentially the maker of its own demise” and laid out some dozen ways in which we have “endangered the future of the entire universe.” For example, experiments in particle colliders could create a black hole that would annihilate the Earth, or a “strangelet” of compressed quarks that would cause all matter in the cosmos to bind to it and disappear. Rees tapped a rich vein of catastrophism. The book’s Amazon page notes, “Customers who viewed this item also viewed Global Catastrophic Risks; Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era; The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse; and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.” Techno-philanthropists have bankrolled research institutes dedicated to discovering new existential threats and figuring out how to save the world from them, including the Future of Humanity Institute, the Future of Life Institute, the Center for the Study of Existential Risk, and the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute.