But most think it's bad, an 'existential risk' — a threat to the species — that we must work out how to avoid.

As a result he puts the existential risk of climate change at one in 1,000, compared with the one-in-10 chance of unaligned artificial intelligence.

The broker said that although the breach of customer data last month did not present an existential risk, the fallout was 'potentially far-ranging'.

He strongly promotes the study of existential risk and has given numerous talks on this topic.

Therefore, reducing existential risk by even a small amount would have a very significant impact on the expected number of people that will exist in the future.