The Paradox of Doom: Acknowledging Extinction Risk Reduces the Incentive to Prevent It
This addresses the issue of why humanity underinvests in catastrophic risk mitigation, such as climate change or AI risks, but is incremental in applying existing economic frameworks to extinction scenarios.
The paper tackles the problem of how extinction risk influences human impatience and investment in risk mitigation, finding that higher extinction risk leads to greater impatience and reduced incentives to prevent extinction.
We investigate the salience of extinction risk as a source of impatience. Our framework distinguishes between human extinction risk and individual mortality risk while allowing for various degrees of intergenerational altruism. Additionally, we consider the evolutionarily motivated "selfish gene" perspective. We find that the risk of human extinction is an indispensable component of the discount rate, whereas individual mortality risk can be hedged against - partially or fully, depending on the setup - through human reproduction. Overall, we show that in the face of extinction risk, people become more impatient rather than more farsighted. Thus, the greater the threat of extinction, the less incentive there is to invest in avoiding it. Our framework can help explain why humanity consistently underinvests in mitigation of catastrophic risks, ranging from climate change mitigation, via pandemic prevention, to addressing the emerging risks of transformative artificial intelligence.