How often do you contemplate the extinction of humanity?
For the sake of your peace of mind, dear reader, I hope not as often as I have been recently. Regardless, you’re likely familiar with the idea that one day, whether in the context of a nuclear wasteland, an asteroid impact, or even just the expansion of the Sun or the heat death of the universe, humanity will cease to exist.
On that day, all of our history, cultural achievements, technological advancement, and shared memory will effectively vanish. You and I and every single person we have ever heard of will be dead and permanently forgotten; the legacy of our existence reduced to dust blowing in the solar winds.
Unfortunately, the responsibility of deciding how long we get before that day may fall solely our generation’s shoulders. So, sorry, it’s time for me to try to wreck your peace of mind.
If you’ve been paying attention, you may not need much convincing on ‘why’ this is our problem. If you haven’t been: in brief, we are likely our own biggest threat.
Since the construction of the atomic bomb, we’ve come chillingly close to nuclear war and potential annihilation several times, usually due to miscommunications or misinterpretations of radar data. In the past few decades, human-driven global warming has raised sea levels and increased the likelihood and destructive power of severe weather (the recent and as-of-yet not fully understood devastation caused by hurricane Helene, for example, was likely abetted by increasing ocean temperatures). In just the past couple of weeks, the rapid development of actually-intelligent artificial intelligence has increasingly pointed towards the advent of AGI perhaps sooner than we are capable of handling or even understanding its ramifications.
Noticing or thinking critically about any of the above threats may have already predisposed you to believe that we carry at least some responsibility for avoiding our own extinction, but Toby Ord, author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, would like to convince you that avoiding extinction and preserving the potential for our species’ continued prosperity may be the single most important task of our generation.
I’ll be frank: I think this is an important book to read, and I highly recommend that you read it soon. Even if you reject the premise, maybe because you don’t believe in climate change or even just find the existential risk thing shrug-worthy (I get it, I guess — if everybody’s dead, who’ll be alive to care?) I suggest that you pick it up before the end of the year and give it a shot. To my friends and family, who make up the majority of my readership (love you): I will give you my copy. It has notes in the margins and is a bit scuffed up from carrying it everywhere the past month, but it’s mostly still readable. Otherwise, you can receive a free paperback copy in the mail by signing up for the 80,000 Hours newsletter, or simply purchase it on whatever platform you prefer to read on.
Now that I’ve frontloaded this review by saying that you should read it, here’s why.
Building common understanding around existential risk has no downsides.
In The Precipice, Ord has done an world-class job of chronicling and categorizing several of the most important mechanisms of existential risk and their scientific bases in accessible, matter-of-fact language. Most writing on existential risk that I’ve consumed tends to be either incredibly surface-level (in 5 billion years, the sun will explode, and then we will all die — unless we fly away in spaceships first!) or completely inscrutable (most papers on how we’re actually building towards AGI, unfortunately, take me absurd amounts of time to actually understand).
I suspect that a dearth of easily understandable, well-referenced information on existential risk has led to the climate we currently exist in today, in which significant portions of society operate on completely different priors (“we’ve already experienced a global pandemic, and it wasn’t that bad, really!” vs. “we have GOT to do a better job mitigating a pandemic next time”), and I think that Ord’s well-researched, levelheaded look at the likelihood and danger of each risk he outlines could be a sufficient remedy to this problem.
Updating your priors will, at the very least, allow you to have a more productive discussion the next time you encounter somebody you disagree with.
Humanity can persist and thrive long after our own deaths, and you should care about securing that future.
Despite being a book concerned with existential risks and the steep odds we face in countering them, The Precipice presents a compelling argument against nihilism and similar philosophies of futility.
“In expectation, almost all humans who will ever live have yet to be born. [Because] almost all of humanity’s life lies in the future, almost everything of value lies in the future as well: almost all the flourishing; almost all the beauty; our greatest achievements; our most just societies; our most profound discoveries.” [Pg. 44].
The human race has immense potential. In our short time on this Earth, we have accomplished incredible feats, built wonders, and generally increased our lifespan and qualities of life significantly. But we have several problems yet to be solved: peace to broker, diseases to eradicate, populations to lift out of poverty. If we succumb to existential threats now, we will never get the chance to reach our true potential.
Our great-great-great-grandparents could not fathom the heights of luxury most of us live in today. The majority of households within the United States have refrigerators, and air conditioning, and washing machines. If we’re feeling peckish and lazy, we can open an app on our phones and order a private taxi to our residence for a single burrito.
Similarly, our great-great-great-grandchildren could live lives we couldn’t begin to imagine today, in societies with justice systems and housing arrangements and educational opportunities and medicinal availability that put ours to shame. Their great-great-great-grandchildren could continue this progress, and their great-great-great-grandchildren after them, and so on.
Halting our societal development in what could just as well be its infancy would be a damn shame.
I believe that our generation bears responsibility for avoiding existential catastrophe and securing our potential, more so than any previous generation, and I think that you should too.
In the interest of keeping this review concise, I will avoid going into too much detail here (the theme of the book is convincing the reader of this argument, after all), but several of the most pressing existential risks to humanity appear to be coming to a head during our lifetimes. We have already grappled with one pandemic. Nations with nuclear weapons arsenals are at war. Record temperatures and increasingly destructive weather are becoming normal. Artificial intelligence is scaling up too quickly for public policy or conventional wisdom to keep up. This book was released in early 2020 and already several chapters play out like prophecy — most hauntingly, of course, the portion on pathogen control, which must have been written just before COVID-19 began to take off.
I strongly believe that before the end of our lives, our generation will be faced with increasingly difficult and existentially important questions. It’s up to us to be prepared to grapple with them, and I think that this book is a fantastic starting point for doing so.
“We have seen that the future is a canvas vast in time and space. Its ultimate beauty will depend on what we paint. Trillions of years and billions of galaxies are worth little unless we make of them something valuable. But here too we have grounds for profound optimism. For the potential quality of our future is also grand beyond imagining.” [Pg. 235]