Technological innovations and future risks to humantiy.

 The majority of future existential risks to humanity are anthropogenic, meaning that they arise from human activity.  Nuclear war springs to mind.




However  one way of making that argument is to say that we've survived for over 100 thousand years, so it seems prima facie unlikely that any natural existential risks would do us in here in the short term, in the next hundred years for instance. 


Whereas, by contrast we are going to introduce entirely new risk factors in this century through our technological innovations (at the risk of called a Luddite) and we don't have any track record of surviving those.  


Source http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/