23 books
—
20 voters
Discover new books on Goodreads
Meet your next favorite book
Existential Risk Books
Showing 1-50 of 106
The Precipice (Hardcover)
by (shelved 13 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.94 — 5,481 ratings — published 2020
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Hardcover)
by (shelved 6 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.85 — 21,830 ratings — published 2014
Global Catastrophic Risks (Hardcover)
by (shelved 4 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.97 — 279 ratings — published 2008
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.32 — 5,513 ratings — published 2020
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.90 — 10,012 ratings — published 2025
What We Owe the Future (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.81 — 6,730 ratings — published 2022
Nuclear War: A Scenario (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.35 — 58,929 ratings — published 2024
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Audio CD)
by (shelved 2 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.99 — 28,258 ratings — published 2017
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.03 — 5,242 ratings — published 2019
X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.11 — 149 ratings — published
The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 2 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.71 — 49 ratings — published 2013
The Vulnerable World Hypothesis (Paper)
by (shelved 2 times as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.27 — 64 ratings — published
AI Safety: Humanity, Control, and the Race to Keep Superintelligence Aligned (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 5.00 — 2 ratings — published
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.99 — 9,300 ratings — published 2023
A Canticle for Leibowitz (St. Leibowitz, #1)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.99 — 124,665 ratings — published 1959
Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.05 — 1,378 ratings — published 2025
The Nuclear case book (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 0.0 — 0 ratings — published 1983
Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Analyses and Prescriptions (Open University Set Book)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 0.0 — 0 ratings — published 1985
Prepared: A Manual for Surviving Worst-Case Scenarios (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.03 — 1,809 ratings — published
Wanderers (Wanderers, #1)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.98 — 32,242 ratings — published 2019
Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.81 — 1,962 ratings — published 2019
Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security (Chapman & Hall/CRC Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Series)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.27 — 11 ratings — published
Atlas de la France toxique (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.60 — 5 ratings — published
Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.44 — 444 ratings — published 2008
The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.08 — 543,327 ratings — published 2006
The Replacing Guilt Series (ebook)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.38 — 310 ratings — published
Politiser le renoncement (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.47 — 15 ratings — published
The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.18 — 12,461 ratings — published 2018
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.16 — 5,722 ratings — published 2009
Danger d'extinction: Changements climatiques et menace nucléaire (French Edition)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.83 — 30 ratings — published
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.18 — 8,740 ratings — published 2012
The Boy on the Bridge (The Girl With All the Gifts, #2)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.96 — 31,398 ratings — published 2017
The Girl with All the Gifts (The Girl With All the Gifts, #1)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.95 — 251,493 ratings — published 2014
No(s) Futur(s)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.79 — 33 ratings — published 2020
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.76 — 1,981 ratings — published 2015
Upgrade (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.80 — 131,694 ratings — published 2022
Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.72 — 2,796 ratings — published 2020
False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.15 — 2,791 ratings — published 2020
To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.77 — 3,205 ratings — published 2017
Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.12 — 33 ratings — published 2016
When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.09 — 1,574 ratings — published 2003
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.10 — 5,023 ratings — published 2019
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.87 — 31,122 ratings — published 2016
The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.94 — 757 ratings — published 2013
The World Without Us (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.81 — 44,015 ratings — published 2007
Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.81 — 2,957 ratings — published 2018
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 3.89 — 4,066 ratings — published 2018
The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.48 — 935 ratings — published 2021
A Short History of Progress (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.10 — 5,528 ratings — published 2004
RetroSuburbia (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as existential-risk)
avg rating 4.52 — 194 ratings — published
“What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy.
Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.
If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.”
― On What Matters: Volume 3
Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.
If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.”
― On What Matters: Volume 3
“A people who choose spectacle over skill will dance to the rhythm of their own extinction.”
―
―