Don’t forget potential non-existential global catastrophes

AI extinction fears risk overshadowing preventable health threats

Anthony Butler

Apocalyptic fears bring with them a danger that more mundane challenges amenable to policy action will be downgraded

First published in Business Day

15 October 2026

Last month, a researcher called Jacob Coxon resigned from the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, claiming that, “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The company’s Evan Hubinger added that the risk of human extinction within a decade is more than 10%.

The mechanisms bringing existential risk remain speculative, and analysts believe AI giants may favour mild regulation to protect them against insurgent competitors and shield them from massive product-liability exposure when their models enable costly cyberattacks. Nonetheless such warnings come alongside competing alarms about global nuclear war, asteroid collisions, novel pathogens, and synthetic mirror-image organisms bringing untreatable infections.

Such apocalyptic fears bring with them a danger that more mundane challenges amenable to policy action will be downgraded. For this reason, it is good news that the Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health has produced a new report categorizing and analysing dozens of global challenges.

The commission’s analysis builds on a baseline scenario that models future demographic shifts and economic trends to help understand how vulnerabilities will affect different populations.

It assesses “the number of years in good health that are lost due to sickness, disability or premature mortality”, a measure known as lost disability-adjusted life years (Dalys).

The report then categorizes global challenges into distinct tiers, ranging from “extinction potential” risks like nuclear conflict and the malicious use of AI to “major catastrophic” risks such as climate change, antimicrobial resistance, and obesity.

The “Dalys” approach captures well the potential impact of low probability risks as AI-engineered biological weapons, cascading disruptions in critical infrastructure, physical detonation of nuclear weapons, planetary agricultural collapse, and global nuclear famine. After all, if we are all dead, there will be no Dalys.

However, it also gives due weight to “major catastrophic threats” that cost fewer life years but are far more likely to occur. Climate change, for example, will bring direct health impacts from extreme heat, shifting patterns of infectious disease, floods, storms, and climate-fuelled air pollution. The study suggests action to contain global warming to 1.8C rather than allowing it to reach 4.4C could prevent almost two billion years of healthy life from being lost.

While headlines frequently focus on extinction-potential threats like nuclear war and AI annihilation, the study’s quantitative approach reveals that most preventable health loss over the next 70 years is likely to be caused by more everyday metabolic and social conditions.

Tobacco accounts for billions of lost DALYs as the dominant driver of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, and lung cancer. Smoking rates in low and middle income countries, moreover, continue to grow, and regulation continues to be circumvented.

High Systolic Blood Pressure is meanwhile the leading physiological driver of stroke, ischemic heart disease, and kidney failure. As with smoking, governments have scope to intervene more to limit its costs using well-understood and cheap interventions such as salt intake reduction and antihypertensive medication.

Worst of all is what the commission calls the “Obesity Cluster” of weight, poor diet, and low physical activity, which it describes as the single largest threat to global health. This cluster of pathologies fuels type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney disease, and cancers. It is driven by ultra-processed foods and sedentary lifestyles that governments can address through policy change.

The commission’s message is that fears about extinction-potential risks should not distract us from well-understood challenges that we are in a position to address using properly funded and “threat-ready” health systems, expanded prevention and preparedness, innovations such as new antibiotics, obesity therapeutics, and climate mitigation, and other tried and tested tools from conventional public policy armouries.

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

February 20, 2026

The return of cyclical pessimism

ANTHONY BUTLER | Tribal solidarity and the rise and fall of powers

Optimistic citizens in post-apartheid South Africa initially viewed their new order in linear terms

First published in Business Day 20 February 2026

Gwede Mantashe. Picture: (Freddy Mavunda)

Long-suffering newspaper subscribers often observe that rambling columnists tend to go round and round in circles as they get older. This may reflect a deepening reservoir of experience on which an ageing scribe can draw, or more likely a recycling of tired old ideas by their increasingly feeble mind. However, it may sometimes display a belated realisation that history sometimes moves in cycles rather than along a straight line of progress or decay.

Christian theology is largely responsible for the dominance of a linear view of time, with creation, the fall, redemption and the last judgment occurring sequentially. But cyclical theories have continued to thrive in many non-Western intellectual traditions. Chinese political thought — on which venerable liberation movement sage Gwede Mantashe draws as if consulting an inner mountain range — has elaborated a sophisticated dynastic cycle theory that begins when a founding ruler unifies a territory, and there is a period of prosperity and just rule. This is invariably followed by corruption, fiscal strain and factionalism and, finally, by rebellion and the restoration of order by a new dynasty.

Meanwhile, conceptions of power and time in some African societies have embedded politics in cyclical cosmologies of seasonality, ritual renewal and ancestor veneration, and certain precolonial polities embraced the killing of rulers seen as cosmically exhausted.

The North African Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, perhaps the greatest scientist of society in the Middle Ages, developed a cyclical theory in which tribal solidarity enables conquest, and a ruling dynasty consolidates power. However, luxury invariably weakens its cohesion, until it declines and is replaced by a new and cohesive tribal force.

Cyclical thinking about democratic advance and backsliding has re-emerged today in response to authoritarian resurgence. Cyclical language of civilisational exhaustion and imperial overstretch has even resurfaced in hilarious neo-Trumpian diatribes about the decline of European civilisation.

Optimistic citizens in post-apartheid South Africa initially viewed their new order in linear terms, commencing with liberation, the establishment of democracy and the forging of a developmental state, and leading ultimately to the creation of a national democratic society.

Today, however, the future is often viewed through a Chinese dynastic cycle lens. Founding legitimacy under Nelson Mandela was followed by an institutional consolidation that embraced social grants and constitutionalism, which was then succeeded by elite factionalisation and corruption, and finally by the erosion of legitimacy. Through Khaldun’s lens, liberation solidarity faded, administrative centralisation became patrimonial, and renewal became difficult without rupture.

Patterns, not prophecies

It is understandable that the optimistic linear projections of 1994 have been supplanted by a more pessimistic cyclical narrative of founding virtue, corruption and erosion. Cycles are just patterns, though, not prophecies.

Newspaper columnists who seem to be losing their marbles may instead be trying to think in both linear and cyclical terms at the same time, though their attempts to describe how repetitive political patterns co-exist with overarching linear narratives may inadvertently summon up visions of a celestial spiral staircase on which we are travelling upwards or downwards while also trudging round and round in circles.

Corruption may be a normal feature of societal change, but institutions can also be renewed. South Africa’s trajectory depends less on destiny than on administrative reform, party restructuring, electoral competition and economic inclusion. Whether renewal or replacement dominates will depend on whether economic stagnation persists, coalition politics stabilises and institutions regain enforcement capacity — and perhaps a little on political leadership and judgment.

Linear theories tend to flourish among political observers when expansion, science or economic growth dominate experience. In that sense the popularity of cyclical thought is itself cyclical, rising when societies experience stagnation, elite conflict and legitimacy crisis, and receding when successful reform or rupture re-establish political order and a credible narrative of linear advance.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

October 10, 2025

Sarupen likely to take Zille’s position

ANTHONY BUTLER: Ashor Sarupen a likely, and good, successor to Zille in DA council

Although strongly associated with Helen Zille, Sarupen cannot easily be painted as her puppet or proxy

First published in Business Day

10 October 2025

Helen Zille’s adoption as the DA’s candidate for the mayorship of Johannesburg has generated a good deal of excitement, but the vacancy she will leave behind in her current position as the party’s federal council chair may be even more consequential.

In a party constitution apparently designed to generate confusion, the DA federal council is the governing body between meetings of the federal congress — the party’s supreme elective gathering, which is convened every two or three years.

The federal council is a hodgepodge that contains members of the federal executive — the top leadership of the party — provincial chairs, some regional chairs, public representatives from the national, provincial and municipal legislatures, and various other panjandrums.

It takes key decisions between congresses, approves candidate selection regulations and holds the party’s public representatives to account. It is required to meet at least three times a year, but typically does so far more often.

The chair of the federal council is responsible for the administration of the party, running its internal machinery, pushing through implementation and managing co-ordinating structures. Any chair must work closely with the federal leader — for example Mmusi Maimane or John Steenhuisen — who is the public face of the party but may not always seem to be in charge.

James Selfe, who served as federal council chair for two decades under the federal leaderships of Tony Leon, Zille and Maimane, kept a low public profile. In contrast, while Zille has been praised for her organisational skills, she has loudly voiced controversial and sometimes polarising views that have weighed on her party’s efforts to broaden its electoral appeal.

Her successor, who will be elected at the next federal congress in April next year, is likely to be the 37-year-old Ashor Sarupen, who has been an MP only since 2019. Although strongly associated with Zille — her former chief of staff and leadership campaign manager — he cannot easily be painted as her puppet or proxy.

A rational and classical liberal, like Selfe, he eschews Zille’s eccentric anti-wokeism and her flirtations with neocolonialism. He worked his way steadily up the party ranks as a city councillor in Ekurhuleni, a member of the Gauteng provincial legislature and, since 2020, as a deputy federal council chair.

Beyond knowing how to keep a low profile, he has two strengths that may recommend him to the party congress. First, he has expertise in economics and corporate strategy, served as DA spokesperson on the finance and appropriations committees, and has by all accounts been a successful deputy finance minister in the government of national unity (GNU). These are crucial skills in a politics dominated by fiscal fantasy.

Second, he is a professional campaigner. A decade ago he played strategic roles in Ekurhuleni, Gauteng and then national election campaigns. Speaking at the Cape Town Press Club on Wednesday, he emphasised the need for modernisation and an increased digital marketing spend relative to still-essential ground campaigning. Such a mindset is essential if the DA is to have any chance of significantly increasing its vote share given the absence of a national branch footprint.

In 2022, the ANC elected a professional campaigner, Fikile Mbalula, as its secretary-general, in a position similar to that of DA federal council chair. It seems likely that the DA will follow suit and choose an analytically minded campaign manager who has demonstrated strong tactical successes and understands both traditional and digital campaign tools, to the position of federal council chair.

Many DA activists feel the party has underperformed under the leadership of Zille and Steenhuisen. There is every chance they will happily dispatch Zille to the battle front in Johannesburg and then choose Sarupen to rebuild party consensus around a less contentious variant of liberalism and recalibrate and modernise campaign strategy.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.