43rd book of 2020. This is how the world ends.
The Precipice is about ways in which humanity could perish.
According to Ord, the chances that humanity could cease to exist within the next century are 1/6.
Total Risk: 1/6
Unaligned artificial intelligence: 1/10. Engineered pandemics: 1/30. Unforeseen anthropogenic risks: 1/30. Other Anthropogenic risks: 1/50.
All natural risks combined: 1/10,000 (asteroids, volcanoes, stellar explosion etc.)
Ord makes a pretty level headed argument about the current path of humanity being at more risk over the next century of extinction than it has ever been. Here, trifling things such as war, or even nuclear war don’t count. Ord is looking for things that permanently damage civilization’s ability to exist. Many of these risks are actually correlated with a potential future great power conflict, in the same way that humans developed nuclear and chemical weapons out of the great wars of the 20th century.
The math was fuzzy, and Ord takes many finger to the wind assumptions, but the directional conclusions were useful. I didn’t agree some of the moral framing around the vast moral good of protecting trillions of lives to come, but appreciated the mathematical approach to species level ethics. Overall learned a few things.