Subtitled: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
(Hachette, 2020, 468pp, including 225pp of resources, acknowledgements, appendices, further reading, notes, bibliography, and index.)
Here is book about existential risks, a topic on which I have several books, though this one and a couple other recent ones address the subject in the context of Effective Altruism. That is, part of EA would be to decide how to direct resources to avoid future calamities, with the usual cost/benefit considerations. Ord, along with MacAskill and Singer and many others, were mentioned in the Rutger Bregman book I read recently (review here). This one seems more specifically focused on risks.
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Key Points
- Author defines the “precipice” as the moment in history when it became possible for the human race to destroy itself, and places that moment at the explosion of the first atomic bomb in 1945. (And it roughly coincides with the beginning of the Anthropocene.)
- This book is about existential risks, which he defines rather precisely. Not just garden-variety catastrophes, from which a small population of humans might eventually recover.
- He places the current situation in the context of humanity as being some 200,000 years old, as having gone through three great transitions, the agricultural revolution some 10,000ya, the scientific revolution, only about 400ya, and the industrial revolution, a couple hundred years ago. Each brought problems, but average human conditions are better now than they’ve ever been in history.
- And, there are potentially centuries ahead for humanity, given the average mammalian species lasting about a million years. If we leave the earth, millions or billions more years are available to us.
- So it’s imperative now to avoid risks while we can take action to avoid them.
- How existential risks are different from extinction or the collapse of civilization. He recalls Jonathan Schell, and invokes the term “longtermism.” This entails the economic concept of ‘discounting’, which places relative values on people alive today vs all those billions who may be alive in the future.
- Then he steps through various natural risks: supervolcanoes, stellar explosions, the death of the sun; anthropogenic risks: nuclear weapons, climate change, environmental damage including resource depletion; and then future risks: pandemics, AI, various dystopian scenarios such as totalitarianism.
- Part Three starts quantifying things, and comes up with a 1 in 2 change that humanity will survive to achieve its potential. Then considers how to prioritize risks, considering importance, tractability, and neglectedness.
- Then a general strategy for humanity. Reach existential security; conduct a “long reflection”; and achieve our potential. The middle step is in MacAskill too. How expanding into space would or would not solve anything. What role a world government would have. What technological progress can do. With examples of what not to do, and what we can do right now.
- The final chapter contemplates our potential: how long humanity might endure; some comments about scale; the quality of human life; and the choices we can make along three dimensions: time, space, and experience.
