2008 panel of experts from the future of humanity institute published the results of a survey regarding the global catastrophic business that humanity will face in the 21st century the results of the questionnaire both surprising and concerning because the experts agree that there is a one in five chance of human extinction before the year 2100 at the 2008 Oxford conference participants considered nanotechnology artificial intelligence and war to be the three categories that were most likely to bring about such an event personally the one that keeps me awake at night is the unbridled development of artificial intelligence it's partially because of the weaponization of artificial intelligence what I like to refer to as the dark triad of offensive lethal autonomous machines the possibility of programming errors or users deliberately inflicting these on any population is the type of thing that makes me nervous the development of artificial intelligence is supposed to make lives a lot easier but in practise might represent the biggest existential threat of all when we see a civilization that effectively disappears without a record of precisely why they left the answer is often rooted in the development of advanced technology because advanced technology enables a larger population to live in a smaller area but if something happens to the resources themselves then you don't have the capacity to support the population anymore when I look at an episode like Rome making an incredible drainage system out of lead pipes and then everyone goes nuts is it all that different than a human society building sub technology to the point where we forget that we're really just part of an ecosystem that's much more powerful than us no matter what we built we have a tendency to assume that we can always innovate our way out of the crisis of the moment also no guarantee that technology will save a civilization when it's faced with an existential threat