Anne Frank famously wrote, “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart,” and if she could be hopeful, how can we feel grounded by despondency? A sneakily cheerful side to the growing cadre of scientists and philosophers focused on existential risks that could drive human extinction is that if we make it through the next century, we may have unbridled abundance. From Aaron Labaree at Salon:

“When we think about general intelligence,’ says Luke Muelhauser, Executive Director at MIRI, ‘that’s a meta-technology that gives you everything else that you want — including really radical things that are even weird to talk about, like having our consciousness survive for thousands of years. Physics doesn’t outlaw those things, it’s just that we don’t have enough intelligence and haven’t put enough work into the problem … If we can get artificial intelligence right, I think it would be the best thing that ever happened in the universe, basically.’

A surprising number of conversations with experts in human extinction end like this: with great hope. You’d think that contemplating robot extermination would make you gloomy, but it’s just the opposite. As [Martin] Rees explains, ‘What science does is makes one aware of the marvelous potential of life ahead. And being aware of that, one is more concerned that it should not be foreclosed by screwing up during this century.’ Concern over humanity’s extermination at the hands of nanobots or computers, it turns out, often conceals optimism of the kind you just don’t find in liberal arts majors. It implies a belief in a common human destiny and the transformative power of technology.

‘The stakes are very large,’ [Nick] Bostrom told me. ‘There is this long-term future that could be so enormous. If our descendants colonized the universe, we could have these intergalactic civilizations with planetary-sized minds thinking and feeling things that are beyond our ken, living for billions of years. There’s an enormous amount of value that’s on the line.’

It’s all pretty hypothetical for now.•