Existential risk has been on many of our minds the past year. Sales of survival goods from food kits to nuclear-proof bunkers are way up, we doomscroll on Twitter all day, and it seems like there isn’t a week that goes by where civilizational collapse isn’t at least a possibility on the agenda.
Yet, if you hang out in tech circles long enough, there remains an astonishing divergence between the realities of existential risk and the speculative nature this subject tends to push us towards.
In Silicon Valley, the fun topics here are scenarios like custom-designed pathogens that …
