By Olivia Gross, Lucy Horowitz, Isaiah Milbauer, and Gabe Moos

The question “Are We Doomed?” has a historical lineage and a future trajectory that we aim to trace through the creation of three syllabi for “Are We Doomed” classes that respectively take place during the Enlightenment, during the Industrial Revolution, and in 2054 — 30 years into the future. Our syllabi treat each iteration of the class in an anachronistic manner that aims to explore each time period’s conception of doom through sources and speakers from the appropriate given time period. We draw on speakers who have long since died or who may not be alive in the future. We also include readings that have been written in the present about the question of existential risk during a different time period. Through these three syllabi, we hope to seek out the answers to questions like: what is the difference between existential risk and doom? How did the idea of existential risk arise? How do and how will different technologies and philosophies shape the development of the idea of existential risk? What emerging technologies will shape our future of existential risk? How do we determine the extent to which a technology is good? Our source of inspiration is our current syllabi for this class and to that end, we generally aim to track the categories of risk that the present day syllabus includes. A central theme of our syllabi is that while there certainly may be a story arc of existential risk that crosses between past, present and future – existential risk also carries a degree of unpredictability as new technologies arise, new ways of thought emerge, and as theories about the world are disproven or redeveloped. In addition, we hope that the historical syllabi give students some more orientation for thinking about the present and future. 

The Enlightenment: read the syllabus here

Samuel Colman, 1838: “The Edge of Doom”

We begin in the Enlightenment because we see this time period as a shift away from singularly religious thought on the question of doom toward our contemporary idea of existential risk. An undercurrent of the syllabus is that an awareness of the possibility of planetary destruction arose in early modernity alongside ideas of prediction, risk, geoscience, astronomic precarity, global governance, empire, and global medicine. Even as the threats to our planet have evolved, many of the ideas of our intellectual toolkit trace their origins to the Enlightenment or are in reaction to these ideas. For example, one reading, “Enlightened Immunity,” shows the origins of global health efforts in early modernity but simultaneously that efforts like inoculation faced resistance. Today, while the spread of disease is highly globalized, health efforts are additionally globalized and inoculation efforts save countless lives. On the other hand, in the Enlightenment, global health was also used as a tool to expand empire. Other readings show how ideas of risk arose in the Enlightenment, from predictions of comets hitting earth to Clausiwitz’s work on non-linearity in war. Another set of readings highlights controversies of Enlightenment thought with respect to existential risk, demonstrating how this body of thought can be interpreted in different ways. One reading argues transhumanism is a continuation of Enlightenment thought whereas another argues that the transhumanist movement is a reversal of Enlightenment’s humanistic notion of human perfectibility. The 2054 syllabus follows up on this conversation with specific readings on scientific advancements in transhumanism, from brain chips to gene modification. Not only did our understanding of the human being change drastically during the Enlightenment,  but also we began to understand our earth system as one that is astronomically precarious (vulnerable to threats like heat death) and subject to the power of terrestrial authority in addition to (or perhaps instead of)  divine authority. These understandings echo our class conversations about the human actions that influence climate change as well as the incomprehensibility of and uncertainty inherent in the scales involved. The Enlightenment syllabus concludes with two pieces that provide big picture understandings and critiques of the lasting relevance of the Enlightenment to future understandings of risk and the world.

The Industrial Revolution: read the syllabus here

Vincent van Gogh, 1887: “Factories at Asnières, seen from the Quai de Clichy”

Next we consider the (second) Industrial Revolution. Many aspects of the modern world have their roots in an advancement that was made during this time period, which we say took place between 1870 and 1914. Consider the automobile: a novelty of the 1880s that went on to completely transform the physical and economic landscape of the entire planet and which we now understand to be a major factor in the causes of climate change—and which we hope to leverage as part of a  solution. The invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 is unequivocally the beginning of the long story that has ushered us to the point where elections are decided and wars are waged on the battlefields of Twitter and Instagram. The discovery and adoption of the germ theory of disease by Louis Pasteur has a triple significance: first, it gave humanity its first real ammunition against the pandemics and plagues we have collectively suffered for countless generations (ammunition we have developed into the very tools we used to understand and combat the COVID-19 pandemic, whether or not you believe it was successful fight). Second, it played a major role in the industrialization of food processing (something we’d done for centuries by cooking, drying, salting, and fermenting) and therefore the globalization of the world’s food supply chains. Finally, it is a near-perfect example of the Kuhnian “paradigm shift” and of explicit conflict between scientists over competing interpretations of the same or similar evidence, which should remind us all of the inherent fragility of our epistemic systems and convictions.

As science, technology, and economy were undergoing a furious birth (or re-birth) during the Industrial Revolution, literature and philosophy were readily keeping pace and even at times outstripping them. Case in point: in the real syllabus for this class, we read E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops, which extrapolated the same concerns we grapple with today about technogenic isolation and alienation from the nascent networking of the world by phone and radio. Ursula K. le Guin said “science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” Consequently, if we care at all about how those who came before us thought about the question “are we doomed” (and we do!), we have a great deal to learn from the fiction that came out of the time period that saw the invention of the very technologies that plague us and our imaginations today. 

2054: read the syllabus here

ChatGPT-4, 2024: “Are we doomed?”

We conclude in 2054 because we see thirty years ahead as a distance in the future that is close enough to the present day to inspire productive speculation but far enough away to raise important questions. Additionally, this period is one that we as students in this class will inherit and for which we will bear responsibility. As seen in the Enlightenment period, a theme throughout the 2054 syllabus is how we will cope with the possibility of planetary destruction. Additionally, this syllabus explores how our dependence on technology might evolve and how our present actions will impact our lives in thirty years. We investigate how coping with existential threats will be different in the future, how education will evolve, and raise questions that relate to the potentially important role of emotional intelligence and the humanities in a world increasingly reliant on technologies that are almost universally portrayed as the ultimate instantiation of rationality.  Lastly, we hope to highlight that even in the future, many of the questions humanity has been facing since the Enlightenment and Industrialization will still be relevant. We hope to show that understanding how to effectively approach existential risk is a timeless challenge. Studying the mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction and civilizational collapse is an ongoing project that has both recurring challenges and new risks that pose different and unique threats.  We aim to underscore the persistent resonance of questions that have troubled society since at least the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, showcasing both of these periods’s timeless relevance. The ongoing saga of mitigating risks leading to extinction and societal collapse continues to unfold, presenting us with unprecedented threats and obstacles both familiar and novel. As we head towards an uncertain future, the imperative of understanding how to approach existential risks remains critical.