Existential Risks: Getting serious about killing off 90% of the human race.

Existential Risks: Getting serious about killing off 90% of the human race.

Today, to my dismay, I rediscovered this, a Dr. Painka who publicly proposed the use of the airborne Ebola virus to kill off 90% of the human race. This man, a member of the Texas Academy of Science and chairman of its Environmental Science Section, received a standing ovation from students and Academy members when he gave a talk on the matter at the University of Texas at Arlington. As Eliezer Yudkowsky points out at Overcoming Bias, it’s silly to be “surprised” by something like this: given the professor’s knowledge set and lax sense of ethics, exterminating 90% of the human population with a flesh-eating virus must seem like a great solution to the planet’s problems, or he wouldn’t be talking about it in the first place.

The problem is the rest of us. We don’t want to have our internal organs turned to mush by a fatal virus. This issue reminds me of an acronym that Phillippe Van Nedervelde used in his talk on existential risks and the Lifeboat Foundation at Transvision 2007 — SIMD — Single Individual, Massively Destructive. He also pointed to the Unabomber, and showed a picture of him when he was a math teacher, looking just like a typical professor. There is a risk from radical, out-of-control nutcases like Al Qaeda, yes, but these people tend to have problems infiltrating truly relevant organizations or acquiring the complex knowledge necessary to do real damage.

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