Inventors Overestimate Catastrophe Likelihood

Early nuclear designers concluded that nuclear war was both catastrophic and fairly likely, but they paid too little attention to how states and militaries would adapt (second‑strike forces, deterrence, crisis management). This creates a recurring error: treating the sheer destructiveness of a technology as a direct guide to its near‑term probability of causing civilizational collapse. — If experts systematically overestimate the probability of catastrophe because they underweight institutional adaptation, policy and public debate about technologies (nuclear, AI, biotech) should calibrate between credible precaution and realistic resilience assumptions.