Chapters

Part II

One Extinction Scenario

The scenario we describe in Part II isn’t a prediction. There are many other ways the future could go, and a longer version of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies would have explored multiple possible scenarios. Below, we’ll go into some of the reasoning behind why we wrote the scenario the way we did, and we’ll describe various problems that arise in sketching out a scenario like this one.

Stories can be compelling in ways that dry reason cannot, and we believe that there’s value in trying to concretely imagine how the future might go. But we also think that it’s important not to get too fixated on one particular narrative. Each decision we make in writing the scenario may seem plausible in isolation, but it does not take many choices before the overall likelihood for a particular path becomes very low. This is what it looks like to have the future contain many hard calls.

However, there are many cases where the outcome is more predictable than the pathway, because many paths lead to the same destination. In the scenario as written, we present multiple different options where feasible, to illustrate that however the story goes, it doesn’t lead anywhere good.