The Precipice Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

I think the entire grid has got eight minutes of battery backup, 10 minutes of battery backup... And Toby Ord wrote this great book called The Precipice. And he is from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. He wrote the best researchers in the world. He got them to rank what are the most dangerous existential risks to humans. And it's a one in 10,000 chance over the next century coming from climate change. It's one in six from AI or one in 10 from AI, one in 10 from engineered pandemics, like one in 30 from natural pandemics.

And you think that if you were to accept that the science and all of the stuff that the climate change people believe in is accurate, I still think that the strategies that they're using aren't going to be effective because I think it turns more people off.

Grace is with Giving What We Can. Giving What We Can would love to give your listeners a free book on effective altruism. If you include this link in the show notes, which we don't have, but we'll just say it here, people can opt to have a free book sent to them, including The Precipice by Toby Ord. Anywhere in the world.

Toby Ord wrote in and said the same thing too, but he also sent us well wishes and said we did a good job on the effective altruism episode, which I thought was pretty good because I like to think we're fairly fair handed with it.

And it is like a really in-depth look at existential risks and the ones we face and, you know, what's coming on the pike and what we can do about them and why.

And it's a really good book and it's written just for like the average person to pick up and be like, I hadn't heard about this and then reach the end of it and say, I'm terrified, but I'm also hopeful.

one of the people who was a participant, an interviewee in The End of the World with Josh Clark, a guy named Dr. Toby Ord, recently published a book called The Precipice.

That you care about people on the other side of the world that you've never met.

That you care about people on the other side of the world that you've never met and people who live in a different time that you will never meet?

And it is like a really in-depth look at existential risks and the ones we face and, you know, what's coming on the pike and what we can do about them and why.

And it's a really good book and it's written just for like the average person to pick up and be like, I hadn't heard about this and then reach the end of it and say, I'm terrified, but I'm also hopeful.

So Toby Ord made a really good point in his book The Precipice, right?

one of the best things that Toby does and he does a lot of stuff really well is describe why it matters.

one more time, Toby Ord's The Precipice is available everywhere you buy books.

And it is like a really in-depth look at existential risks and the ones we face and, you know, what's coming on the pike and what we can do about them and why.

And it's a really good book and it's written just for like the average person to pick up and be like, I hadn't heard about this and then reach the end of it and say, I'm terrified, but I'm also hopeful.

one of the people who was a participant, an interviewee in The End of the World with Josh Clark, a guy named Dr. Toby Ord, recently published a book called The Precipice.

So Toby Ord made a really good point in his book The Precipice, right?

one of the best things that Toby does and he does a lot of stuff really well is describe why it matters.

Grace is with Giving What We Can. Giving What We Can would love to give your listeners a free book on effective altruism.

If you include this link in the show notes, which we don't have, but we'll just say it here, people can opt to have a free book sent to them, including The Precipice by Toby Ord.

We love sending out books and think this is a great way for people to engage more with the ideas.

Free books on effective altruism and free books by Toby Ord on existential risks, which I mean, come on.

And it is like a really in-depth look at existential risks and the ones we face and, you know, what's coming on the pike and what we can do about them and why.

And it's a really good book and it's written just for like the average person to pick up and be like, I hadn't heard about this and then reach the end of it and say, I'm terrified, but I'm also hopeful.

one of the people who was a participant, an interviewee in The End of the World with Josh Clark, a guy named Dr. Toby Ord, recently published a book called The Precipice.

That you care about people on the other side of the world that you've never met.

That you care about people on the other side of the world that you've never met...Why would you care any less about these people, human beings that you'll never meet whether they live on the other side of the world at the same time or in the same place you do but at a different time?

Second is The Precipice by my colleague Toby Ord. I certainly couldn't not mention it. I really see What We Are The Future as like a compliment, like a sister book to The Precipice

The next book is The Precipice by Toby Ord. That book talks about things like pandemic risk, artificial intelligence risk. It's a really interesting book to take yourself out of the day-to-day politics and think about the things that could really devastate the future of humanity and how can we invest up front now?

The next book is The Precipice by Toby Ord. That book talks about sort of things like pandemic risk, artificial intelligence risk. It's a really interesting book to sort of take yourself out of the sort of daytoday politics and think about what could really devastate the future of humanity and how we can invest up front now in solving it. After the coronavirus pandemic... I've been thinking more about other existential risks we aren't thinking about.

Third book is about the future. I'll recommend The Precipice by Toby Ord, which we've talked about. It's about the idea of existential risk. It goes through the different things that might happen that could permanently cut off humanity's future. I think it's a really good read.

Toby Ord has written this book, The Precipice, on this as well. I love it. It's one of my top five books ever.

The original conception by toby ord in the precipice was written probably about six years ago maybe maybe four years ago so this is before chat gpt and I'm going to guess that he would have increased his his uh estimation so he's ai's gonna wipe his ayes it's the most likely

Toby Ord's from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford with Nick Bostrom and he's a colleague of William McCaskill, long-termism, EA, et cetera. And he uses this example of... You can imagine on a journey, a particular individual getting to a beautiful, lush, abundant meadow would have to take a treacherous mountain path and along this mountain path, there is a particularly thin, small, steep, sharp, uncertain, unstable part of it. That's the precipice.

And he talks about... I like to think about it like an hourglass. You have width with room and then you have a choke point and at that choke point, things can get dicey and it's Toby's contention that if we make it through this precipice, you broaden out and you have the meadow and you are a multi-planetary species. You have redundancy genetically, redundancy civilisationally.

You have overcome some of the limitations of the castoffs from your energy production and consumption.

Long termism is the primary research focus of both the Global Priorities Institute and an FHI linked organization directed by Hillary Greaves and the Forthought Foundation run by William McCaskill, who also holds positions at FHI and GPI.

Adding to the tangle of titles, names, institutes and acronyms, long termism is one of the main cause areas of the so-called effective altruism movement, which was introduced by Ord in around 2011 and now boasts of having a mind boggling $46 billion in committed funding.

It is difficult to overstate how influential long termism has become.

I also mentioned a book called the precipice by Toby Ord which is discussion of existential risk in particular viscous of these really big scale catastrophes