A new popular science book on existential risks and mass extinctions from Annalee Newitz, the founding editor of io9.com
It probably won’t display the same rigour as *Global Catastrophic Risks *(Bostrom, Cirkovic et al.), but that was published five years ago and is a bit academic. A new book written in a popular, journalistic way seems pretty appealing—it might even be a good introduction for family/friends. Anyway I’m looking forward to reading it, and I expect enough other LWers will be interested in this news to warrant the post.
If anyone has any other existential risk book recommendations, please comment.
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Some reviews on goodreads
A more popular book may definitely be in order. Also, the organization of "Global Catastrophic Risks" struck me as a little tonedeaf: There’s a chapter in it (by Eliezer I think?) talking about how people shut down when talking about very large scale events like full on extinction. But the book starts off talking about how we expect the entire universe to fall apart in trillions of years, so it automatically starts by getting people to have all the bad reactions to existential risk up to 11. I’m optimistic that this book won’t make that mistake.
Last year there was The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It, by the editor of Scientific American, Fred Guterl, who also appeared on The Daily Show to promote the book.
The parts about machine superintelligence and uploading are in chapter 22, "Your Body is Optional," featuring Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg.