Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids ( 小行星) and super volcanoes, but the more likely (_26_), according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.

Professor Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human (_27_) risks are poorly understood and, worse still, (_28_) underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are (_29_) or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that (_30_) from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.

Despite his concerns about the risks (_31_) to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite （科技进步反对者）. In fact, he is a longtime (_32_) of trans-humanism—the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in (_33_), probability theory, to try and determine how we as a (_34_) might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might (_35_) in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.