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It’s only a matter of time until something terrible happens,” The New York Times’s Ron Lieber wrote in a 2012 piece examining Airbnb’s liability issues. My family’s story — a private matter until now — is that terrible something.

Living and Dying on Airbnb

Their children abandoned them to join the worst terror organization on earth. Now all they have is each other.

Mothers of ISIS

Bostrom does not find the lack of obvious existential threats comforting. Because it is impossible to endure extinction twice, he argues, we cannot rely on history to calculate the probability that it will occur. The most worrying dangers are those that Earth has never encountered before. “It is hard to cause human extinction with seventeenth-century technology,” Bostrom told me.

The doomsday invention