X-Risk Quotes

“In 1967, the architect Lewis Mumford wrote of the human brain as a 'neural efflorescence' like those 'in the botanical realm', one of those 'extravagances and exuberances of nature' in which evolution overreaches itself:

The very excess of 'brainness' set a problem for man not unlike that of finding a way of utilizing a high explosive trough inventing a casing strong enough to hold the charge and deliver it.

This, he argued, must have proved maladaptive, thus endangering the survival of early humans. Nature's grandest flower was drooping under its own luxuriant weight. Mumford suggested that it was only by unloading and storing this 'hyperactivity' into 'cultural containers', damning up our sapient surplus in the supererogations of art and curiosity, that our species has avoided 'behaving like a racing motor that burns itself out for lack of a load'. But latent self-destructive potential still lurked just beneath the surface.”
― Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction

“Without the more developed sense of history that only fully flourished in modernity - reflected in the notion of a future potentially utterly unlike the past - there is no room for thinking of perils or promises that outstrip present and past experience.”
― Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction

“This, of course, had long been Teilhard de Chardin’s preferred explanation for the Great Silence. Chardin saw sophidetonation as an implosion inward rather than an explosion outward: a form of centralisation like the evolution of the brain, but threading across the planet rather than rebounding within the skull. This was what he called Point Omega, a form of transcendence where intelligence essentially disappears into its own self-created virtual domain, leaving mundane reality behind all together. Never one to miss a religious resonance, Chardin noted that this ‘supreme synthesis’ is a ‘phenomenon perhaps outwardly akin to death’.

In fact, this was the final one of Shklovsky’s ‘internal contradictions’: if reason consists in denying natural inclinations then, of course, it will end up etherealising itself out of existence...”
― Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction

“The future of the human organism is here phased out by a tumefying mechanosphere and, as Butler wrote, the ‘servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master’. In using machines to adapt our environment to our ends, we instead end up becoming increasingly adapted to the machine. In this sense, the tool—which was once a mere means—transforms ‘into the master’. Günther Anders picked up on this theme beautifully a century later. He wrote that, through mechanisation, we are constructing our own extinction-by-obsolescence. By ceding everything to the machine in the name of convenience, we are wilfully manufacturing a ‘world without us’—in so far as we will eventually be adapted out of the rat race, a casualty of evolutionary parsimony. Where others had spoken of humans becoming parasites of the technological realm, Anders spoke of the technological realm ‘parasitically exploiting’ us. Technology is a ‘skin cancer’ on the planet, he wrote (hours after receiving treatment for the lung tumour that later killed him), a ‘metastasis’ that lives ‘parasitically’ off the biosphere.

Indeed, we might classify industrial modernity itself as a mechanical, planet-enclosing brood parasite: just as the Sacculina is a diversion of resources away from crab reproduction, hijacking the crab’s instincts to nurture the next generation of barnacles, so too does industry divert and capture the resources of humanity, utilising our ancient appetites to pollinate and propagate itself by luring us with artificial pleasures, from sugar to screens, while our own fertility collapses.”
― Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction