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The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity Kindle Edition
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If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late.
Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity.
An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last.
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHachette Books
- Publication dateMarch 24, 2020
- File size6238 KB
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Review
"A powerfully-argued book that alerts us to what is perhaps the most important-and yet also most neglected-problem we will ever face."―Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save
"The Precipice may be the Silent Spring that the futurists have been waiting for."―Los Angeles Review of Books
"The Precipice separates science from hype and will remain the definitive work on existential risk for a long time to come."―Max Tegmark, author of Life 3.0 and Our Mathematical Universe
"The Precipice is a fascinating book, one that showcases both the knowledge of its author and his humanity."―Bryan Walsh, Axios
"This book is a wake-up call to the existential threats of nuclear and biological weapons and the urgent need for action. A must-read that galvanizes us to play a role in addressing these risks."
―Angela Kane, former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs
"A fascinating and persuasive guide to the most important topic of all: how our species will survive the risks we pose to our continued existence."―Stuart Russell, author of Human Compatible and Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
"Toby Ord is today's Carl Sagan. Clear and inspiring, this book leaves us hopeful for a flourishing human future."―Christine Peterson, co-founder of the Foresight Institute
"Splendid....The Precipice is a powerful book, written with a philosopher's eye for counterarguments so that he can meet them in advance. And Ord's love for humanity and hope for its future is infectious, as is his horrified wonder at how close we have come to destroying it."―The Spectator
"Many people have recently found that they want to read books offering the grandest perspectives possible on human existence, such as Sapiens . . . Toby Ord's new book is a startling and rigorous contribution to this genre that deserves to be just as widely read."―Evening Standard
"Ord's map of the existential risk landscape is an engaging read for anyone who wants to learn more about this important and interdisciplinary research."―Science
"Ord's analysis of the science is exemplary . . . Thrillingly written"―Sunday Times --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B07V9GHKYP
- Publisher : Hachette Books; Illustrated edition (March 24, 2020)
- Publication date : March 24, 2020
- Language : English
- File size : 6238 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 480 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #71,428 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Toby Ord is a philosopher at Oxford University, working on the big picture questions facing humanity. His earlier work explored the ethics of global poverty, leading him to make a lifelong pledge to donate 10% of his income to the most effective charities helping improve the world. He created a society, Giving What We Can, for people to join this mission, and together its members have pledged over $1.5 billion. He then broadened these ideas by co-founding the Effective Altruism movement in which thousands of people are using reason and evidence to help the lives of others as much as possible.
His current research is on risks that threaten human extinction or the permanent collapse of civilization, and on how to safeguard humanity through these dangers, which he considers to be among the most pressing and neglected issues we face. In his new book, The Precipice, he explains the risks we face, the stakes for humanity, and how we can find a path forward. Toby has advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the US National Intelligence Council, and the UK Prime Minister's Office.
tobyord.com
theprecipice.com
givingwhatwecan.org
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Our young people rarely learn about the consequences of making minor changes to personal, group or country wide thoughts. Increasingly, as adults, we don't have the time to 'think' a lot about the consequences of our life styles, our political decisions or what we allow our elected representatives to do in our names for - and to us.
Toby Ord is an extraordinary scientist, and philosopher; he is also a relatively young person who has, on our behalf, done an extraordinary amount of work and research to make complex ideas accessible to most of us, regardless of age, education or culture. Increasingly his analysis is being sought by governments, corporations and Think Tanks pondering the consequences facing Humanity, Planet Earth, Communities everywhere, Families and each of us, as 8 billion people and corporations introduce technology quicker and quicker - all while our climate changes are happening with unpredictable aggregate effect.
The Precipice is a 400+ resource that is accessible, readable and compelling; it's a book that each of us can read slowly and it has useful ideas and information that may help all of us, and our children, lead more peaceful and productive lives.
On the subject of the AI technology, and how it may move us, help us or control us, he has this to say (p. 146-147): For the most damaging people in history have not been the strongest. Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan achieved absolute control over large parts of the world using words to convince millions of people to win the requisite physical contests. So long as an AI system can entice or coerce people to do its physical bidding, it wouldn't need robots at all......The most realistic scenarios may involve subtle and non-human behaviors which we can neither predict, nor truly grasp. And these behaviors may be aimed at weak points in our civilization to which we are currently blind...
The AI section is interestingly shedding much needed light on how complex commercial systems already are bending entire countries to their will by controlling and monitoring our media, purchase habits and cell phone use. Mr. Ord has shown us that philosophy may need to be re-introduced into our schools and Book Clubs, as a matter of survival of the species.
Toby believes that our times are special, because only recently (in historic terms) humans possessed technologies which allow us to destroy ourselves. The increase of power is not met with heightened wisdom - we are still narrow-minded creatures, risking nuclear war over national squabbles, racing in unregulated biotechnology and AI research, polluting our planet in the name of next quarter’s profits. It is not moral to jeopardize the lives of untold future generations, just because we are too short-sighted to notice that we owe them the chance. Recklessness may prevent us from realising the true potential of humanity, “probably the only complex and significant part of the universe”.
If we manage to pull through, future historians will look back at our period as the pivotal age of humanity embracing the long-term, wise course. This book hopes to lay foundation for such a change, by identifying existential risks and proposing methods to tackle them. It seems that the highest risk is man-made, so there is an expectation that countries with better aligned governments should spell unimpeded progress and prosperity to all.
I understand why this book was written and what it tries to accomplish. I admire the research and fact-checking. More than a few times I have ruminated over the book’s passages. However, I am afraid that the overall tone is not very persuasive. It lacks compelling stories which could inspire future efforts, leans heavily toward statistics, sometimes reading like a project proposal for management of a risk portfolio. Nevertheless, it is worth a try, as it offers unusual perspective and intriguing insights.
My last two cents - in (tongue in cheek) defense of short-termism. Toby Ord urges to coordinate in order to increase the chance of humanity fulfilling its destiny. He defends it as moral. But, wouldn’t it be an even more astounding feat if our civilisation thrived without such efforts? We are a product of “let’s promote what works now” evolution, and our societies emerged from collective actions of usually self-centered individuals. Perhaps it is our way, and the beauty comes from our flaws. Do we really have to optimise and max out?
That said, I believe his treatment of climate change understates that issue. For example, disruption of ocean circulation will have dramatic weather and climate impacts globally, not just some cooling in the North Atlantic as Ord supposes. Still, I agree that whether climate change is an existential risk (over the next 3-5 centuries) or merely catastrophic is a debatable issue. None of that diminishes the urgent need to deal with climate change, as I'm certain Ord would agree.
Engineered pandemic - that's nothing short of damned scary!
He did get me thinking about unaligned AI. Unaligned AI is perhaps the most difficult of the risk to quantify because expert opinions are divergent. Estimates of the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), range from 10 to 50 years, and even never. Nonetheless, people need to be thinking a lot more about the risks of AGI, and how AI will be impacting our society in general. Read Ord's book, and then read Stuart Russell's book Human Capatible on AI.
Top reviews from other countries
前半は論理的に分かりやすく異論はないが、気候変動では滅亡にまでは至らないとしてAIの暴走を当面の最大の危機と見積もるのは本書の特徴かもしれない。全体的に Steven Pinker 的な楽観論とMax Tegmark的な時空の広がりがあるように思う。違う言い方をすればカント的な人間理性への信頼か? また、世代間倫理的な観点が強く出ている。人類の極めて長期の存続は文句なしに善でありかつ可能であるとされ、ここ数百年の危機を乗り切ったならば人類が銀河のスケールで広がっていくこともありえる (原文 canやmayではなくmight )という。逆に文明の進歩を止めればやがて来る破局的自然災害(隕石 etc)などで滅ぶのでそれはできない。著者は科学や技術を否定して「自然に帰れ」などと言ってるのではない。
ここまでくると、科学ではなく哲学とも言い難くある種の「思想」と思った方がいいが、物理法則で禁じられないことは人間が愚かにも自滅しなければ実現の可能性はゼロではない、というスタンスのようだ。ただ、銀河の話はともかく、人類の(比較的)長期の存続という観点が当たり前になるくらい人間が進化してもいいと評者も考えるし、具体的なことを考えるきっかけとして一度は遥か未来、銀河の果てまで思いを馳せてみるのも悪くない。
Toby Ord estimates a 1 in 6 chance that humankind will go extinct in the next 100 years. This is, surprisingly, an optimistic view. Other academics have estimated 1 in 4 (Nick Bostrom) and 1 in 2 (Martin Rees).
Ord makes the persuasive case that the vast majority of this risk is from human actions. For example, the creation of a super intelligent AI is likely to be unaligned with human interests. In other words, AI has its own goals and doesn’t care about ours.
It follows that if most of this risk is caused by human actions, then human actions could reduce this risk. The most important section of the book is simply titled “What You Can Do”. A call to save humanity from itself.
Wayne Christensen
Loads of academics could spend decades in conferences, throwing around impressive mathematics and concepts and philosophical and political ideas, only to be as subject to the pointlessness of fate as the builder who built the conference hall, or the cleaner who cleaned the seats before the conference. Of course we have to care about humanity and about the future, just as we have to care about the welfare of our own children. Of course we have to live as if things are going to go on and on, and try to make them better all the time. But that is just common sense and decency. It doesn’t make it any better if we complicate any of it with equations identifying risk probabilities, or get all worked up about the world of our great-great grandchildren, about which we know almost nothing. (Those equations are surely only given value if they relate to the real world, e.g. they increase the safety of road or air travel vehicles.)
Perhaps I found the vision of the book simply too huge for normal human beings. The best things to do with our expertise and intelligence and expert opinions is to be pragmatic about solving current issues – climate change, political and economic conflicts, and the potential threats from artificial intelligence – with a focus on the next fifty years, and let the century after that take care of itself. All we can hope to leave behind is a good example and the fruits of our experience and knowledge.
Ethical philosophy about any future society is potentially rather silly. Imagine getting someone in a time machine from a mere 150 years ago and bringing them to today – when all of their ideas about women and foreigners and music and sexuality and conduct in society would be screamingly out of place and wildly intolerant to our eyes. How do you think that someone in 150 years might feel about, say, paedophilia? It’s only a (really unfortunate) sexual orientation, isn’t it, which you can’t “help” any more than being gay, so criminalising it and being thoroughly disgusted by it and condemnatory of it – which is our current society’s response, overwhelmed by the emotional reaction to the vulnerability of child victims – is surely going to be looked back upon as primitive. Hating and criminalising it is no more capable of solving resulting social/psychological/ emotional problems than believing that it is in the nature of black slaves to be slaves, once a widely accepted attitude. So how disgusted might we be, from our time and our perspective, by the activities and fashions of the society of 3,000 years in the future? We might not even think they are worth saving the world for, with their genetically modified inhabitants of Mars and Titan with heaven-knows-what in the way of social and sexual practices, with their sex robots and their utterly incomprehensible music and their stupid religions and mad political set-ups. (I’m not saying they won’t think their existences are just fine, thank you!)
So yes, he’s right that we’re on a Precipice, and that only we can do something about it. But that’s virtually nothing to do with what we might get up to when we become capable of settling other planets, for example, or how long the stars will last or how fast the universe is expanding (if it is – something else our great-great-grandchildren might have vastly different explanations for, looking back on our quaint ideas about string theory and parallel universes and dark energy, and taxation and social policies, and even perhaps on the threats from AI). There is much of interest in this book and you might have a completely different perspective on it from mine, but I think it could have been a damn sight shorter and more near-future focused, in order to make a greater impact. Not that I have an ounce of the influence that the author has, in academic and political circles.
It is, incidentally, one of the most infuriating books I have read – it was absolutely necessary to use two bookmarks, because half of the information, and half of the book, is in a gigantic footnotes section. There is therefore, if you want to appreciate what is being discussed, endless going back-and-forth, to take in long notes – these footnotes are rarely just a reference to something you can find in the bibliography. It would have made much better reading if many of the footnotes were simply incorporated into the main text, where, in my opinion, they really belong.
To return to what I said at the beginning, Toby Ord is clearly brilliant, and a great guy, but I was left with very mixed feelings about this book. If you want the big picture, and don’t mind also putting up with some waffle (rather speculative) about the probabilities, or if you want to support the future-humanity charities that the book’s royalties are all going to go to, buy the book. You could have done worse things in your life or with your money. But I don't think it will be one of the best books you ever read.





