Here's something that worries me greatly about the legacy of the current pandemic.

This was not a black swan event. Rather, it was a "gray rhino," or a high-probability, high-impact event that we (stupidly, see "Trump") ignored. The worry is this: post-COVID, a huge amount of 1/

political and scientific attention will be given to obviating future pandemics. But pandemics are NOT the only gray rhinos facing us this century. For example, sooner or later -- and perhaps sooner, given the geological record -- a supervolcano *is going to erupt*. 2/

The result will be pitch-black skies at noon for years, and maybe decades, resulting in the catastrophic collapse of global agriculture, and thus mass starvation. The same could be said about climate change, asteroid impacts, nanoweaponry, drone ("slaughterbot") attacks, 3/

cyberwarfare, potential disasters associated with (stratospheric) geoengineering, artificial general intelligence, and so on, and so on.

The lesson that should we need to learn is NOT that civilization should spend all its resources preventing the next pandemic, but that 4/

it should spend all its resources preventing *the next gray rhino*, whatever that happens to be. (To be clear, not *all* of our resources. Black swans pose any number of existential threats.)

5/

I doubt we'll learn this lesson, though, due to cognitive biases like the "availability bias." Hence, the next global catastrophe could very well be a completely avoidable disaster, like COVID was, that we never saw coming because we chose not to look.

6/6

( @anderssandberg, @ETVPod, @Simon_Beard, @BalkanDevlen)