The Paradox of Doom: Acknowledging Extinction Risk Reduces the Incentive to Prevent It

2025-09-05

AI Summary

This paper identifies a paradox wherein heightened existential risk—such as from climate change, pandemics, or AI misalignment—undermines intergenerational cooperation, leading to underinvestment in long-term public goods. Method: We extend the intergenerational discounting framework by formally distinguishing individual mortality risk from species-level extinction risk, integrating intergenerational altruism theory with evolutionary “selfish gene” logic to construct a rigorous theoretical model. Contribution/Results: We demonstrate that existential risk compresses individuals’ expected future lifespan and attenuates intergenerational utility transmission, thereby endogenously increasing the effective discount rate. This generates an incentive failure—“the more dangerous, the less action”—where escalating extinction threats exacerbate short-termism. Our analysis provides a novel, time-preference–based explanation for the persistent global shortfall in provisioning long-term public goods, offering theoretical grounding for policy interventions targeting discount-rate recalibration.

Technology Category

Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Cooperative Game TheoryReasoning under Uncertainty: Other Foundations of Reasoning under UncertaintyMultiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystemsUser Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalizationSocial Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

Abstract

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.

Problem

• Analyzes how extinction risk perception reduces prevention incentives
• Examines discount rate components from human vs individual mortality risks
• Explains underinvestment in catastrophic risk mitigation across domains

Innovation

• Framework distinguishing extinction and mortality risks
• Incorporates intergenerational altruism and selfish gene
• Extinction risk increases impatience reducing mitigation incentives