existential risk

Noun

existential risk (countable and uncountable, plural existential risks)

1. A risk which could destroy or permanently damage an entity; a risk to one's existence.
   • In an industry that relies more than anything on the appearance of total control, total safety, these two crashes pose as close to an existential risk as you can get.2019 April 18, Gregory Travis, “How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer”, in IEEE Spectrum
   • I believe TSLA faces existential risk based on what is happening in the world today, and that this recent scare and economic recession will only catalyze further share price decline.2020 March 30, “Tesla Faces Existential Risks”, in Seeking Alpha
2. (specifically) A hypothetical future event which could cause human extinction or permanently and severely curtail humanity's potential.
   • The scenario of humanity going extinct in the next century is a disjunctive event. It could happen as a result of any of the existential risks we already know about—or some other cause which none of us foresaw.2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks”, in Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Ćirković, editors, Global Catastrophic Risks, New York: Oxford University Press...
   • But perhaps the strongest reason for judging the total existential risk within the next few centuries to be significant is the extreme magnitude of the values at stake.2013 February, Nick Bostrom, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority”, in Global Policy, volume 4, number 1, archived from the original on 08 Sep 2020