causal
Type-3 Vulnerability: Aggregated Weak-Actor Harm
A third type of vulnerability arises when a large number of weak actors each face incentives to take individually negligible actions that aggregate into civilizational damage; global warming illustrates this, and counterfactually a higher climate sensitivity (e.g. 50 degrees instead of 3) or more expensive alternatives would have turned fossil fuels into a black ball.
causalpending
Speaker
Nick BostromEvidence Quote
“we reach into the urn we create a lot of inventions and we hope that there won't be some discovery that just sort of happened to create incentives for a lot of individuals to take actions that benefit each individual but that have this slight negative global externality that adds up sufficiently to do our civilization”
Created: 6/14/2026, 2:44:30 AM
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