AI Survival Stories: a Taxonomic Analysis of AI Existential Risk

2026-01-14

AI Summary

This study addresses whether advanced artificial intelligence constitutes an existential threat to humanity and systematically analyzes plausible pathways for human survival. Building upon the premises that “AI will become extremely powerful” and “if AI becomes extremely powerful, it will destroy humanity,” the work proposes the first comprehensive typology of AI existential scenarios, translating abstract possibilities of survival into concrete, analyzable trajectories. Through logical analysis, philosophical argumentation, and risk modeling, the paper identifies four primary classes of survival narratives, elucidates their key challenges and policy implications, and offers a preliminary quantitative foundation for assessing the probability of AI-induced existential catastrophe (P(doom)).

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Philosophical Foundations of AI
• Humans and AI: Other Foundations of Human Computation & AI
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Other Foundations of Reasoning under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Research challenges in human and human-AI computation
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

Abstract

Since the release of ChatGPT, there has been a lot of debate about whether AI systems pose an existential risk to humanity. This paper develops a general framework for thinking about the existential risk of AI systems. We analyze a two premise argument that AI systems pose a threat to humanity. Premise one: AI systems will become extremely powerful. Premise two: if AI systems become extremely powerful, they will destroy humanity. We use these two premises to construct a taxonomy of survival stories, in which humanity survives into the far future. In each survival story, one of the two premises fails. Either scientific barriers prevent AI systems from becoming extremely powerful; or humanity bans research into AI systems, thereby preventing them from becoming extremely powerful; or extremely powerful AI systems do not destroy humanity, because their goals prevent them from doing so; or extremely powerful AI systems do not destroy humanity, because we can reliably detect and disable systems that have the goal of doing so. We argue that different survival stories face different challenges. We also argue that different survival stories motivate different responses to the threats from AI. Finally, we use our taxonomy to produce rough estimates of P(doom), the probability that humanity will be destroyed by AI.

Problem

• AI existential risk
• survival stories
• P(doom)
• artificial intelligence
• human extinction

Innovation

• existential risk
• AI safety
• taxonomy
• survival scenarios
• P(doom)