Existential Risk and Growth

Leopold Aschenbrenner and Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)

GPI Working Paper No. 13-2024

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Technology increases consumption but can create or mitigate existential risk to human civilization. Though accelerating technological development may increase the hazard rate (the risk of existential catastrophe per period) in the short run, two considerations suggest that acceleration typically decreases the risk that such a catastrophe ever occurs. First, acceleration decreases the time spent at each technology level. Second, given a policy option to sacrifice consumption for safety, acceleration motivates greater sacrifices by decreasing the marginal utility of consumption and increasing the value of the future. Under broad conditions, optimal policy thus produces an “existential risk Kuznets curve”, in which the hazard rate rises and then falls with the technology level and acceleration pulls forward a future in which risk is low. The negative impacts of acceleration on risk are offset only given policy failures, or direct contributions of acceleration to cumulative risk, that are sufficiently extreme.

An earlier version of the paper was published as GPI Working Paper No. 6-2020, and is available here.

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