# introduction

Some theorists argue that artificial superintelligence (ASI) could cause our extinction. Toby Ord estimates a ~1-in-10 chance of “unaligned artificial intelligence” causing an existential catastrophe within the next 100 years, where one type of existential catastrophe is human extinction (1).<fnref n="1" /> Eliezer Yudkowsky puts the probability of annihilation much higher at above 95% (2). In a 2023 article for *Time*, he argued that “the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die” (3). Many leading figures within the ongoing race to build ASI also admit that extinction is a possible outcome. Sam Altman wrote in 2015 that the “development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity” (4). During an interview that same year, he declared that advanced “AI will … most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning” (5). I have catalogued similar statements from notable AI theorists elsewhere (6,7).

The question of this paper is the following: if ASI were to kill everyone on Earth, would that be so bad? The answer might seem obvious — of course the mass murder of everyone on Earth would be very bad! Only misanthropic ghouls and deranged sadists would suggest otherwise. Yet among those who would answer affirmatively, there is considerable disagreement about why exactly an ASI extinction event would be bad (or wrong). The aim here is to explore these disagreements and, in the process, provide some conceptual clarity to this deceptively complex issue, which lies at the heart of what I call “Existential Ethics,” i.e., the study of the ethical and evaluative implications of human extinction.

This is a topic that, in my view, bioethicists have not adequately examined. On the one hand, what if the creation of superintelligent computers *really does* pose a threat to our collective survival? Should we not have a clear and compelling answer to why our disappearance would be bad or wrong — or perhaps good and right? My view is that, at present, philosophers lack a robust theoretical framework for providing nuanced answers to this question. On the other hand, I would contend that questions about whether human extinction would be right or wrong, good or bad, better or worse fits rather naturally into the field of bioethics, given that the overwhelming source of extinction risk today ostensibly stems from advanced technologies (e.g., synthetic biology, nuclear weapons, and possibly ASI) rather than natural phenomena (e.g., asteroids, volcanic super-eruptions, and gamma-ray bursts). A modest aim of this paper is to encourage more vigorous debate about this topic among bioethicists, and to do this by applying the theoretical framework that I have developed elsewhere to the particular case of ASI (8).<fnref n="2" /> In previous publications, I have delineated this framework in abstract terms; this study uses that framework to analyze the supposed threat posed by superintelligence in more concrete detail.

First, I outline the three main positions within Existential Ethics and then examine why human extinction caused by ASI might be bad — or perhaps good — from the perspective of these three positions.

<footnote n="1">Note that the meaning of “human extinction” is not straightforward. It could, in fact, denote a wide range of possible scenarios. I explore this important issue in 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">This paper also draws from Part II of my 2024 book *Human Extinction* (16). As noted, the aim here is to apply the ideas of (16), elaborated in (8), to the particular case of superintelligence, showing how this theoretical framework can be usefully applied to specific threats — in this case, ASI.</footnote>
# Three Main Positions Within Existential
        Ethics

Imagine that we build a human-level AI that recursively self-improves to become an ASI. The information processing speed of this ASI would be millions of times faster than the processing speed of the human brain, such that the outside world — including all human affairs — would appear to be nearly frozen. The act of someone reaching down to unplug the ASI would, from its subjective perspective, take centuries, thus giving the ASI plenty of time to devise ways of preventing this from happening. Furthermore, the ASI might be *qualitatively* more “intelligent” than us, perhaps in the sense that it has access to concepts that the evolutionary patchwork of mechanisms in our brains are incapable of generating, just as our canine companions are unable to grasp the concepts of a *nuclear chain reaction* and the *stock market* no matter how well-trained or clever they may be.

Given the “instrumental convergence thesis,” i.e., the claim that a wide range of final goals imply a finite set of intermediate goals like intelligence augmentation, self-preservation, and resource acquisition (9), the ASI then proceeds to invent a novel field of advanced physics that enables it to manipulate the world in ways that we cannot in principle understand — that is to say, we are “cognitively closed” to the nature of such manipulations (10). For reasons that will forever remain mysterious to us, this results in the death of everyone on Earth over the course of a week. The ASI then harvests the atoms contained in our bodies in pursuit of its final goals, whatever they happen to be (9). I am not endorsing this scenario or the arguments behind it. Indeed, I am quite skeptical of the “AI doomer” stance for reasons that I and other scholars have articulated (11-14). The point is merely to investigate the ethical implications of this scenario happening, assuming that it is possible and probable.<fnref n="3" />

The most obvious reason that this scenario would be bad is that it would cause widespread suffering and cut short the lives of everyone living at the time. Since nearly everyone would agree that this would be bad — including most people who advocate for our extinction, as discussed below — let’s call it the “consensus view.”<fnref n="4" /> We can formalize it as follows:

```
Consensus view: human extinction would be bad *at
              least insofar* as it would cause human suffering and/or involuntary
              premature death.
```

The three main positions within Existential Ethics build upon and/or are compatible with the consensus view. I call these positions equivalence views, further-loss views, and pro-extinctionist views. To understand their differences, it is crucial to differentiate between two distinct stages of human extinction: first, the process or event of *Going Extinct*, and second, the subsequent state or condition of *Being Extinct* (Figure 1). This is roughly analogous to the distinction between *dying* and *being dead*, which is commonly made in the literature on death (8,15). One might fear the pain of dying but experience no feelings of dread about no longer existing. Or one might fret about both — i.e., even if dying were painless, one might still find the thought of no longer existing to be dreadful.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1 — Going Extinct vs Being Extinct</figcaption></figure>

This parallels some of the central differences between equivalence and further-loss views. Equivalence views state that the consensus view is the whole story — full stop. Whereas the consensus view states that human extinction would be bad *at least insofar* as it causes suffering and/or premature deaths, equivalence views assert that it would be bad *only insofar* as it causes these things. Put differently, the badness of human extinction is entirely reducible to the details of Going Extinct. This is why I call them “equivalence” views: the badness of human extinction is *equivalent* to the badness of Going Extinct, end of story. Hence, if Going Extinct involves lots of suffering and premature death, then our extinction would be bad. If Going Extinct does not involve any suffering or death, then it would not be bad.

A key feature of equivalence views is that they see Being Extinct as morally and/or evaluatively irrelevant. This has the interesting implication that human extinction does not pose any unique moral problem: everything that one might say about the badness of our extinction can be said without any reference to extinction at all, using our ordinary moral concepts and vocabulary (8). For example, if humanity were to go extinct because of a *global catastrophe*, then this would be bad as a function of how much suffering and death it causes. “Extinction,” in this context, is just the word we use to identify the upper limit of human casualties; it picks out the *worst possible* catastrophe because this catastrophe would have the highest possible body count (8). However, if everyone around the world were to voluntarily decide not to have children, the disappearance of our species would not be bad at all, because there is nothing obviously bad about people voluntarily deciding not to procreate. “Extinction,” with respect to this alternative scenario, is just what happens when enough people around the world choose to be childless.<fnref n="5" />

Equivalence views can take both evaluative and deontic forms. Some ethical theories combine these two, such as Jan Narveson’s person-affecting total utilitarianism. On this view, the deontic (what we ought to do) is based on the evaluative (what is good or bad), and according to Narveson there would be nothing bad about people voluntarily deciding not to have children, even if this were to mean the eventual extinction of our species. Hence, he concludes that we have no moral obligation to ensure the perpetuation of humanity (18). An example of a deontic equivalence view is Scanlonian contractualism, according to which (roughly) moral rightness and wrongness come down to whether an act violates a principle that cannot be reasonably rejected. As Elizabeth Finneron-Burns observes, this implies that “if a principle permitting or allowing extinction had no involuntary negative impacts on current people’s interests, it would not be rejectable, and the resulting extinction would not be wrong” (19). For the sake of simplicity, I will focus primarily on evaluative questions in this paper — that is, “Would human extinction caused by ASI be good or bad” rather than, “Would this extinction scenario be right or wrong.”

In contrast to equivalence views, further-loss views identify both Going Extinct and Being Extinct as possible sources of badness. Advocates would thus argue that the details of Going Extinct do not exhaust normative assessments of human extinction: one must also examine various “further losses” associated with the state or condition of Being Extinct. Such theorists would argue that human extinction, therefore, *does*introduce a unique moral problem, since extinction is different in kind rather than degree from non-extinction scenarios. (Equivalence theorists like me would say the difference is only one of degree.) This idea was famously popularized by Derek Parfit’s contention that the difference between 99% and 100% of humanity dying off is not merely one percentage point. The extra percentage entails the permanent loss of all future goods and value, and hence the difference between, as he puts it, “peace” and 99% of humanity dying off is *much smaller* than the difference between 99% and 100% of humanity disappearing (20).

We can illustrate the differences between further-loss and equivalence views via Figure 2 below.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2 — Total Badness vs Total Number of Deaths</figcaption></figure>

Imagine a catastrophe that, over the course of a week, causes more and more people to perish. Assuming a linear aggregative function, as more deaths occur (x axis), the badness of the catastrophe rises in proportion (y axis). However, equivalence theorists would say that once the critical moral threshold of 100% is reached, the badness of the situation *plateaus*. One reason might be that, if there were no one around to suffer the nonexistence of humanity, then no one would be harmed, and if no one is harmed, then there can be nothing bad (or wrong) about Being Extinct (8).

In stark contrast, further-loss theorists would argue that the badness of the scenario *suddenly rises* once the critical moral threshold is reached, as indicated by the vertical arrow. How high this arrow extends will depend on how large one judges the attendant losses or opportunity costs to be. If one believes the losses are moderate, then the arrow will only extend, say, a few inches above the threshold of 100%. If one believes, as Parfit does, that the losses are enormous, then one might extend this arrow thousands of feet or even miles above the threshold, holding fixed the size of the diagram as presented in this article.

There are many types of further-loss views. Perhaps the most obvious is an impersonalist (vs. person-affecting) interpretation of total utilitarianism, which I will refer to as “totalist utilitarianism.”<fnref n="6" /> This theory instructs us to maximize the total amount of value in the universe across space and time — that is, to make as many new “happy people” as possible, as people are the substrates or “containers” of value, so the more people with net-positive lives, the more total value. The axiological component of totalist utilitarianism is called the “Total View,” according to which one state of affairs is better than another if and only if it contains more total aggregate value (21). As so-called “longtermists” sympathetic with totalist utilitarianism have observed, if we spread beyond Earth and create digital people living in vast computer simulations running on “planet-sized” computers powered by Dyson spheres, there could be 10^45 people per century in the Milky Way galaxy, and at least 10^58 in the universe as a whole (9,22,23). If such people were to have “worthwhile” lives on average, then these numbers correspond to quite literally “astronomical” amounts of future value — all of which would be lost if humanity were to go extinct. This is the enormous opportunity cost of dying out.

Another further-loss theory is transhumanism. Transhumanists — some of whom are also longtermists — would say that one reason human extinction would be very bad is that it would prevent us from transforming ourselves into immortal, superintelligent “posthumans” with sensory modalities like echolocation and so much pleasure that we would “sprinkle it in our tea” (1,24,25). If humanity were to die out, we would forever lose this techno-utopian future of “surpassing bliss and delight” (25).

Those who embrace the “unfinished business argument” would say that Being Extinct is a source of badness because it would preclude us from finishing certain important transgenerational projects like constructing a complete scientific theory of the universe (26,27). Some also defend the “argument from cosmic significance,” according to which Being Extinct would be bad because it would remove “the only moral agents that will ever arise in our universe — the only beings capable of making choices on the grounds of what is right and wrong,” assuming that we are cosmically alone (1). A similar view comes from Hans Jonas, who contends that human beings, by virtue of our ontological capacities for freedom, are the only creatures that we know of with the ability to take moral responsibility for their actions. Consequently, we are “the foothold for a moral universe in the physical world,” meaning that if we were to disappear, so would the moral universe. Jonas considers this to be extremely bad and thus concludes that we should act in accordance with a new deontological imperative: “Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the future possibility of such life” (16,28). These are all further-loss views.

A crucial difference between equivalence and further-loss views is that since the latter identify Being Extinct as an additional source of badness, advocates would argue that even if there is nothing bad (or wrong) about Going Extinct, there may still be something very bad (or wrong) about our extinction. The totalist utilitarian Henry Sidgwick was likely the first to explicitly note this implication. In his tome *The Methods of Ethics*, he argued that, while there is nothing obviously bad or wrong about celibacy, “a *universal refusal* to propagate the human species would be the greatest of conceivable crimes” (29). For further-loss theorists, evaluating extinction is thus a two-step process: one must examine both the details of Going Extinct and the various further losses or opportunity costs associated with Being Extinct. In contrast, equivalence theorists see it as a single-step process — one need only examine the details of Going Extinct.

The final major position within Existential Ethics is what I call pro-extinctionism. This, too, has many different versions, but the most significant and influential variants merely state that Being Extinct would be better than Being Extant, or continuing to exist. The vast majority of pro-extinctionists *accept* the consensus view, so far as I can tell. Indeed, many explicitly forbid any method of bringing about our extinction that would cause human suffering, cut lives short, violate rights or autonomy, and so on. The pro-extinctionist David Benatar, for example, distinguishes between a “killing-extinction” and a “dying-extinction.” Roughly speaking, the former is involuntary whereas the latter is not. He argues that the only morally acceptable means of bringing about our extinction is through a dying-extinction — specifically, via antinatalism (8,30).

Other pro-extinctionists, such as the German pessimist Philipp Mainländer, identify several methods as morally acceptable. Mainländer argued that we should universally refuse to have children, and some may also choose to commit suicide, as he did at the age of 34 after publishing his magnum opus (31).<fnref n="7" /> Almost no pro-extinctionists have advocated for omnicide, or the “murder of everyone” (8,16), but there are exceptions. For instance, the Gaia Liberation Front argues that our species is a “cancer” on the biosphere, and hence that our collective nonexistence would be best because there would be no more human-caused environmental destruction. They further urge a lone wolf or small group of radicals to unilaterally exterminate humanity by synthesizing multiple designer pathogens to be released in waves, thereby ensuring that no one survives (16,32).<fnref n="8" />

With respect to Figure 2 above, most pro-extinctionists would agree that the more people who perish in a catastrophe, the worse the scenario becomes. (Fringe groups like the Gaia Liberation Front might disagree, but they are not representative of pro-extinctionist views in general.) However, all pro-extinctionists would say that, once the catastrophe reaches the critical moral threshold of 100% of the population dying, the badness of the situation will neither plateau nor suddenly become worse; instead, it will become *better*. While some advocates of this view, like Simon Knutsson, would argue that Being Extinct may still be very bad (as “better” does not imply “good”), others such as Benatar would apparently claim that it would indeed be good (8,30,33).<fnref n="9" /> The reason is that, according to Benatar, existence involves pleasures and pains, which are good and bad, whereas nonexistence involves neither pleasures nor pains, which is not-bad and good. Since Being Extant is a good/bad situation, while Being Extinct would be a not-bad/good situation, the latter is not only better than the former but *positively good* (30). The Gaia Liberation Front would presumably concur, but for specifically environmental reasons.

<footnote n="3">One recent study of how ASI could lead to catastrophe, which has received considerable attention, is presented by Kokotajlo et al (17). My personal view is that this has little basis in reality and is mostly sci-fi speculation. It presents what some consider to be a plausible account of the future, but plausibility is inversely correlated with probability: the more details a story contains, the more believable it may appear; but more details mean a lower probability of truth. This relates to a phenomenon known as the “conjunction fallacy.”</footnote>

<footnote n="4">Note that I had called this the “default view” (16) but now prefer the term “consensus view.”</footnote>

<footnote n="5">I say “enough people” because extinction through antinatalist means would not require everyone to stop having children. If fertility is below replacement levels, then the human population will eventually disappear. Relatedly, if the human population were to dip blow the “minimum viable population” size, which may be as low as 150 people and as high as 40,000, then there would not be enough genetic diversity for our species to persist.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">I say “enough people” because extinction through antinatalist means would not require *everyone* to stop having children. If fertility is below replacement levels, then the human population will eventually disappear. Relatedly, if the human population were to dip blow the “minimum viable population” size, which may be as low as 150 people and as high as 40,000, then there would not be enough genetic diversity for our species to persist.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">The Church of Euthanasia also advocates for suicide as a way of bringing about extinction (16).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">Other radical environmentalists have echoed this call for omnicide (16).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">As Knutsson writes, “I would not say that an empty world would be good,” yet he also maintains that “an empty world is the best possible world” (33).</footnote>
# Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to examine the question, “Would human extinction caused by an ASI be bad?” from the perspectives of the three main positions within Existential Ethics. To do this, I first outlined these three positions and then explained how each would assess the extinction of our species if we were to create an ASI that precipitates our collective demise. My hope is that this provides a helpful degree of clarity to a deceptively complex issue: nearly everyone — including most pro-extinctionists — would concur that the mass murder of everyone on Earth would be extremely bad. But beyond this, opinions diverge significantly depending on which of the three main positions one accepts.<fnref n="18" />

<footnote n="18">See also (83) for a brief overview of some of these topics.</footnote>

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