And, democracy solves extinction

There is an intimate and neglected relationship between existential risk and democracy. Democracy must be central to efforts to prevent and mitigate catastrophic risks. It is also an antidote to many of the problems manifest in the TUA. Do those who study the future of humanity have good grounds to ignore the visions, desires, and values of the very people whose future they are trying to protect? Choosing which risks to take must be a democratic endeavour. We understand democracy here in accordance with Landemore as the rule of the cognitively diverse many who are entitled to equal decision-making power and partake in a democratic procedure that includes both a deliberative element and one of preference aggregation (such as majority voting)45,115. Decision-making procedures are not either democratic or non- democratic, but instead lie on a spectrum. They can be more or less democratic, inclusive, and diverse. We posit three reasons for why we should democratise research and decision-making in existential risk: the nature of collective decision-making about human futures, the superiority of democratic reason, and democratic fail-safe mechanisms. Avoiding human extinction, or crafting a desirable long-term future, is a communal project. Scholars of existential risk who take an interest in the future of Homo sapiens are choosing to consider the species in its entirety. If certain views are excluded, the arguments for doing so must be compelling. Democracy will improve our judgments in both the governance and the study of existential risks. Asking how our actions today influence the long-term future is one of the most difficult intellectual tasks to unravel, and if there is a right path, democratic procedures will have the best shot at finding it. Hong and Page116,117 demonstrate both theoretically and computationally that a diverse group of problem-solving agents will show greater accuracy than a less diverse group, even if the individual members of the diverse group were each less accurate. Accuracy gains from diversity trump gains from improving individual accuracy. Landemore115, builds on this work to advance a probabilistic argument that inclusive democracies will, in expectation, make epistemically superior choices to oligarchies or even the wise few. This is supported by promising results in inclusive, deliberative democratic experiments from around the world 118. In the long run, democracies should commit fewer mistakes than alternative decision-making procedures. If this is true, it should improve the accuracy of research efforts and decision-making. We are more likely to make accurate predictions about the mechanisms of extinction, probable futures, and risk prevention if the field invites cognitive diversity, builds flat institutional structures, and avoids conflicts of interest. Thereare many ways to consider the interests of the many. Democratic assemblies could allow global citizens to deliberate about the futures they prefer, citizens could be surveyed, and the field of ERS itself could be diversified. At the moment, the field is, as many academic disciplines are, unrepresentative of humanity at large and variably homogenous in respect to income, class, ideology, age, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, and professional background. The latter issue is particularly true of existential risk, which, despite being an inherently interdisciplinary endeavour, is at the highest levels dominated by analytic moral philosophers. We need to be vigilant to what perspectives are not represented in the study of existential risk. An awareness of bias will go some way towards mitigating its negative effects. To get close to replicating the cognitive diversity found among humans, we must begin by inviting different thinkers with different values and beliefs into the field. Democracies can limit harms. Any approach to mitigating existential threats could create response risks, and the TUA seems particularly vulnerable to this. Despite good intentions and curiosity-driven research, it could justify violence, dangerous technological developments, or drastically constrain freedom in favour of (perceived) security. If we hope to explore ideas but minimise harms, democracies can be used to moderate the measures taken in response to harmful ideas. It seems, for example, vanishingly unlikely that a diverse group of thinkers or even ordinary citizens would entertain the idea of sacrificing 1 billion living, breathing beings for an infinitesimal improvement in reaching an intergalactic techno-utopia. In contrast, the TUA could recommend this trade-off. The democratic constraint of extreme measures may simply be a form of collective selfinterest. Voters are unlikely to tolerate global catastrophic risks (GCRs), which incur the death of a sizeable portion of the electorate, if they know they themselves could be affected. We expect that scholars who do not support sacrificing current lives in the name of abstract calculations, but would still like to explore the use of expected value theory in existential risk, will be in support of democratic fail-safe mechanisms. Empirically, this fail-safe mechanism seems to work. Even deeply imperfect democracies, like the ones we inhabit now, often avert detrimental outcomes. Democracies prevent famines 119 (although not malnutrition)120. They make war — a significant driver of GCRs — less likely 121. The inclusion of diverse preferences in democracies, such as those achieved through women’s suffrage, further decreases the likelihood of violent conflict 122. Citizens often show a significant risk aversion in comparison to their government. While surveys are notoriously difficult to collect and interpret, existing data suggest that the public has little support for nuclear weapons use 123–125, but strong support for action against climate catastrophe 126–128. We can further show that when citizens deliberately engage with the subject at hand, their concern and readiness for action often increases 118. For example, citizen assemblies on climate change have recommended widespread policy-changes across sectors, amendments to incentive structures and laws against ecocide to reach emissions targets 129. Indeed, many lament that when it comes to genetically modified organisms and nuclear power, citizens are far too riskaverse130 . The problem is not that the public is riddled with cognitive biases that make them unconcerned about global catastrophes. Democratic debate cannot be an afterthought. Navigating humanity through crises will involve many value-laden decisions under deep uncertainty. Democratic procedures can deal with such hard choices. Greater cognitive diversity should be represented amongst scholars of ERS. Recommendations on policies that would reduce risk should be passed through deliberative assemblies and await the approval of a wider pool of ordinary citizens, as they will be the ones who will bear this risk. A homogenous group of experts attempting to directly influence powerful decision-makers is not a fair or safe way of traversing the precipice.