Why Is No One Talking About Existential Risk? | Mara Cortona | Modern Wisdom Podcast 229

Existential risks threaten the permanent destruction or irreversible crippling of human potential, while global catastrophic risks involve mass death and drastic quality-of-life collapse without necessarily ending the species. The latter are more probable and nearer term, and often more motivating for public concern.

Asteroids, supervolcanoes, and natural pandemics exist but have low annual probability; our own technologies—climate change, engineered pathogens, nuclear war, misaligned AI, nanotech—have rapidly amplified risk, making this century unusually dangerous compared with our species’ past.

We are wired for tribes of ~150 people (Dunbar number), concrete stories, and short-term incentives, not for abstract trillions of future lives or century-scale risk models. This mismatch explains why COVID-19, climate, and AI safety struggle to get rational, coordinated responses.

Cortona argues we are unlikely to “sway the masses” into the right behaviors at scale—especially when many are in survival mode or misinformed. Instead, the actions of a relatively small technological, corporate, and policy elite, plus better tech (e.g., clean energy, alt-proteins, biosecurity tools), will drive real risk reduction.

Traditional intuitions about goodness focus on visible, local help and warm feedback loops. Cortona suggests shifting toward evaluating actions by measurable outputs and effectiveness (e.g., bed nets for malaria, Gates-style philanthropy), even when they feel less emotionally satisfying.