Tegmark and his op-ed co-author Frank Wilczek, the Nobel laureate, draw examples of cold-war automated systems that assessed threats and resulted in false alarms and near misses. "In those instances some human intervened at the last moment and saved us from horrible consequences," Wilczek told me earlier that day. "That might not happen in the future."

As Andersen noted in his Aeon piece, there are still enough nuclear weapons in existence to incinerate all of Earth’s dense population centers, but that wouldn't kill everyone immediately. The smoldering cities would send sun-blocking soot into the stratosphere that would trigger a crop-killing climate shift, and that’s what would kill us all. (Though, "it’s not clear that nuke-leveled cities would burn long or strong enough to lift soot that high.")

"We are very reckless with this planet, with civilization," Tegmark said. "We basically play Russian roulette." Instead the key is to think more long term, "not just about the next election cycle or the next Justin Bieber album." Max Tegmark, it seems, also does not care for Justin Bieber.

That’s what this is really about: More than A.I., their article was meant to have us start thinking longer term about a bigger picture. The Huffington Post op-ed was an opening salvo from The Future of Life Institute, of which all four scientists are on the advisory board. The article was born of one of the group’s early brainstorming sessions, one of its first undertakings in keeping with its mission to educate and raise awareness. The Future of Life Institute is funded by Jaan Tallinn, founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa (remember Kazaa, the MP3-“sharing” service that everyone started using after Napster?). Tallinn also helped found Cambridge's Centre for Existential Risk. The world of existential risk is a small one; many of the same names appear on the masthead of Berkeley’s Machine Intelligence Institute.

"There are several issues that arise, ranging from climate change to artificial intelligence to biological warfare to asteroids that might collide with the earth," Wilczek said of the group’s launch. "They are very serious risks that don’t get much attention. Something like climate change is of course a very serious problem. I think the general feeling is that already gets a lot of attention. Where we could add more value is in thinking about the potentials of artificial intelligence."

Tegmark saw a gap in the intellectual-cosmological institute market on the East Coast of the United States, though. "It’s valuable to have a nucleus for these people to get together," he said. The Future of Life Institute’s upcoming launch event at MIT will be moderated by Alan Alda, who is among the star-studded, white-male Scientific Advisory Board.

The biggest barrier to their stated goal of raising awareness is defining the problem. "If we understood exactly what the potentials are, then we’d have a much better grip on how to sculpt it toward ends that we find desirable," Wilczek said. "But I think a widely perceived issue is when intelligent entities start to take on a life of their own. They revolutionized the way we understand chess, for instance. That’s pretty harmless. But one can imagine if they revolutionized the way we think about warfare or finance, either those entities themselves or the people that control them. It could pose some disquieting perturbations on the rest of our lives."