Three Existential Risks & (Perhaps!) No One Is Tracking
The existential risk community has become predictable. AI dominates the discourse. Climate change gets obligatory mentions. Nuclear war makes cameos. Pandemics had their moment. But three risks hide in plain sight, untracked because they don't fit neat categories or generate fundable research programs.
First: semantic collapse. Not misinformation or deep fakes - those are symptoms.
The risk is losing consensus reality itself. When every fact becomes contested, every image suspect, every historical record malleable, civilizations don't need external threats. They dissolve from within. Rome didn't fall to barbarians. It fell when Romans stopped agreeing what Rome meant. We're building technologies that make truth optional. GPUs don't just generate images; they generate realities. The assassination attempt footage you saw last week? The protest that sparked outrage? The scientific study that changed policy? In five years, distinguishing authentic from synthetic will require computational resources most won't have. This isn't about fact-checkers or media literacy. It's about the substrate of shared reality dissolving. Civilizations require common stories. What happens when the story-making machinery serves infinite, incompatible narratives?
Second: complexity ratchet failure. Every efficiency gain increases fragility.
Every optimization removes slack. Every integration creates new dependencies. We've built a civilization that requires perfection to function. Food supply chains span continents with three-day buffers. Financial systems execute millions of transactions per second with no human oversight. Power grids balance supply and demand in real-time across thousands of miles. One compromised certificate authority could halt global commerce. One misconfigured BGP announcement could partition the internet. One contaminated batch of a precursor chemical could stop pharmaceutical production worldwide. The risk isn't that these systems will fail - they fail constantly. The risk is we've removed the ability to function without them. A civilization that needs satellites to farm, algorithms to trade, and networks to govern has no fallback. We're not tracking this because it's not one risk - it's ten thousand risks whose interaction we can't model.
Third: cognitive substrate decay. Not intelligence decline - capability shift.
Human brains evolved for persistence hunting and small group politics. We've retrofitted them for abstract reasoning through education, discipline, and cultural scaffolding. That scaffolding is dissolving. Median attention spans measure in seconds. Synthesis becomes curation becomes consumption. Critical thinking atrophies when answers arrive faster than questions form. This isn't "kids these days" grousing - it's measurable degradation in humanity's cognitive commons. Universities report students unable to read books. Executives make decisions from bullet points of bullet points. Engineers trust Stack Overflow over understanding. We're not getting dumber; we're forgetting how to think. AI makes this worse by removing the friction that forced understanding. Why learn when you can prompt? Why remember when you can search? Why reason when you can generate? A species that outsources cognition while facing complex challenges has already written its epitaph.
These aren't distant speculations. Semantic collapse accelerates with each election cycle. Complexity failures cascade through supply chains monthly. Cognitive decay shows in every metric of human attention and comprehension. They compound each other - less shared reality means less coordination; less coordination means more fragility; more fragility means less slack for deep thinking; less deep thinking means less ability to recognize false realities.
The terrifying part? These risks might be features, not bugs. Market forces drive toward hyperreality because engagement metrics reward it. Economic pressures eliminate slack because efficiency wins quarterly earnings. Cognitive outsourcing happens because it feels like augmentation. We're not sleepwalking into disaster - we're sprinting toward it while checking our portfolios.
Traditional risk assessment fails here because these aren't risks with solutions - they're predicaments woven into our civilizational operating system. You can't regulate away reality breakdown when the regulators can't agree on reality. You can't add resilience to systems optimized for efficiency without making them uncompetitive. You can't restore cognitive sovereignty to minds already colonized by convenience.
The question isn't how to prevent these risks - it's whether any complex civilization can survive its own success. Perhaps the universe's silence isn't about alien biology.
Perhaps every species that builds networks eventually networks itself into oblivion.
Not with a bang or a whimper, but with a push notification they can't quite remember why they ignored.