Benjamin Todd

In the future, we might face diseases even deadlier than COVID-19 or smallpox, whether through natural evolution or created through bioengineering, the technology for which is becoming cheaper and more accessible every year.

In our eyes, the chance of a pandemic that kills over 100 million people over the next century seems similar to and likely greater than the risk of nuclear war or runaway climate change.

So it poses a threat that's at least similar in magnitude to both the present generation and future generations.

But risks from pandemics are even now far more neglected than either of these.

We estimate that over $600 billion is spent annually on efforts to fight climate change, compared to $1 to $10 billion towards biosecurity aimed at addressing the worst-case pandemics.

Moreover, there are some ways the risks from pandemics could be even greater.

It's very difficult to see how nuclear war or climate change could kill literally everyone and permanently end civilization.

But bioweapons with this power seem very much within the realm of possibility, if given enough time.

At the same time, there's plenty of relatively straightforward things that could be done to improve biosecurity, such as improving regulation of labs, building bigger stockpiles of personal protective equipment or PPE, and developing cheap diagnostics to detect new diseases quickly.

Overall, we think biosecurity is likely more pressing than climate change.

We currently think that biosecurity is one of the world's most pressing problems.

But there are issues that might be even more important, and seem to be even more neglected.

preventing an AI-related catastrophe.

Around 1800, civilization underwent one of the most profound shifts in human history, the Industrial Revolution.

There's a graph here with years from 0 to 2000 on the x-axis and world average income in 1990 US dollars on the y-axis.

This graph stays more or less flat, it's only going up slightly until about 1800, staying below $1,000, and then suddenly it just turns a corner and shoots upwards, and ends at nearly $8,000, and the point where it starts to increase rapidly is labelled Something Weird Happened.

Looking forward, what might be the next transition of this scale, the next pivotal event in history that shapes what happens to all future generations?

If we could identify such a transition, that may well be the most important area in which to work.

One candidate is bioengineering, the ability to fundamentally redesign human beings, as discussed, for example, by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens.

But we think there's an issue that's even more neglected and is developing far more rapidly.