The Precipice: ‘A book that seems made for the present moment’ New Yorker

by Toby Ord

INTRODUCTION

trillions of years, to explore billions of worlds. Such a lifespan places present-day humanity in its earliest infancy. A vast and extraordinary adulthood awaits.

We see a species precariously close to self-destruction, with a future of immense promise hanging in the balance. And which way that balance tips becomes our most urgent public concern.

Fuelled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves—severing our entire future and everything we could become.

Yet humanity’s wisdom has grown only falteringly, if at all, and lags dangerously behind. Humanity lacks the maturity, coordination and foresight necessary to avoid making mistakes from which we could never recover.

As the gap between our power and our wisdom grows, our future is subject to an ever-increasing level of risk. ...

This is a book about existential risks—risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s longterm potential. Extinction is the most obvious way humanity’s entire potential could be destroyed, but there are others. If civilisation across the globe were to suffer a truly unrecoverable collapse, that too would destroy our longterm potential. And we shall see that there are dystopian possibilities as well: ways we might get locked into a failed world with no way back.

Existential risks present new kinds of challenges. They require us to coordinate globally and intergenerationally, in ways that go beyond what we have achieved so far.

To do justice to this topic, we will have to cover a great deal of ground. Understanding the risks requires delving into physics, biology, earth science and computer science; situating this in the larger story of humanity requires history and anthropology; discerning just how much is at stake requires moral philosophy and economics; and finding solutions requires international relations and political science.

This book is ambitious in its aims. Through careful analysis of the potential of humanity and the risks we face, it makes the case that we live during the most important era of human history.

So The Precipice presents a new ethical perspective: a major reorientation in the way we see the world, and our role in it.

I have not always been focused on protecting our longterm future, coming to the topic only reluctantly. I am a philosopher, at Oxford University, specialising in ethics.

Each chapter of The Precipice illuminates the central questions from a different angle. Part One (The Stakes) starts with a bird’s-eye view of our unique moment in history, then examines why it warrants such urgent moral concern. Part Two (The Risks) delves into the science of the risks facing humanity, both from nature and from ourselves, showing that while some have been overstated, there is real risk and it is growing. So Part Three (The Path Forward) develops tools for understanding how these risks compare and combine, and new strategies for addressing them. I close with a vision of our future: of what we could achieve were we to succeed.

1 STANDING AT THE PRECIPICE

Our main focus will be humanity’s ever-increasing power—power to improve our condition and power to inflict harm.

HOW WE GOT HERE

Our species, Homo sapiens, arose on the savannahs of Africa 200,000 years ago.

when we think of humanity’s great achievements across time, we think almost exclusively of deeds recorded on clay, papyrus or paper—records that extend back only about 5,000 years.

We rarely think of the first person to set foot in the strange new world of Australia some 70,000 years ago; of the first to name and study the plants and animals of each place we reached; of the stories, songs and poems of humanity in its youth.3 But these accomplishments were real, and extraordinary.

What set us apart was not physical, but mental—our intelligence, creativity and language.

FIGURE 1.1 How we settled the world. The arrows show our current understanding of the land and sea routes taken by our ancestors, and how many years ago they reached each area.

In ecological terms, it is not a human that is remarkable, but humanity.

At several points in the long history of humanity there has been a great transition: a change in human affairs that accelerated our accumulation of power and shaped everything that would follow.

While the Fertile Crescent is often called ‘the cradle of civilisation’, in truth civilisation had many cradles.

in places where the climate and local species were suitable: in east Asia; sub-Saharan Africa; New Guinea; South, Central and North America; and perhaps elsewhere too.11

FIGURE 1.2 The cradles of civilisation. The places around the world where agriculture was independently developed, marked with how many years ago this occurred.

Early forms of science had been practised since ancient times, and the seeds of empiricism can be found in the work of medieval scholars in the Islamic world and Europe.17 But it was only about 400 years ago that humanity developed the scientific method and saw scientific progress take off.

The rapid pace allowed people to see transformative effects of these improvements within their own lifetimes. This gave rise to the modern idea of progress.

Where the world had previously been dominated by narratives of decline and fall or of a recurring cycle, there was increasing interest in a new narrative: a grand project of working together to build a better future.

Soon, humanity underwent a third great transition: the Industrial Revolution. This was made possible by the discovery of immense reserves of energy i...

The steam engine allowed the stored chemical energy of coal to be turned into mechanical energy.

Productivity and prosperity began to accelerate, and a rapid sequence of innovations ramped up the efficiency, scale and variety of automation, giving rise to the modern era of sustained economic growth.

Life in the centuries following the Agricultural Revolution generally involved more work, reduced nutrition and increased disease.

The unequal distribution of gains in prosperity and the exploitative labour practices led to the revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century.

Yet despite these real problems, on average human life today is substantially better than at any previous time.

We often think of economic growth from the perspective of a society that is already affluent, where it is not immediately clear if further growth even improves our lives.

But the most remarkable effects of economic growth have been for the poorest people.

In today’s world, one out of ten people are so poor that they live on less than two dollars per day—a widely used...

That so many have so little is among the greatest problems of our time, and has been ...

Until the Industrial Revolution, any prosperity was confined to a tiny elite with extreme poverty the norm.

Before the Industrial Revolution, just one in ten of the world’s people could read and write; now more than eight in ten can do so.

For the 10,000 years since the Agricultural Revolution, life expectancy had hovered between 20 and 30 years.

It has now more than doubled, to...

It can be hard to believe such trends, when it so often feels like everything is collapsing around us. In part this scepticism comes from our everyday experience of our own lives or communities over a timespan of years—a scale where downs are almost as likely as ups.

We cannot be sure these trends towards progress will continue. But given their tenacity, the burden would appear to be on the pessimist to explain why now is the point it will fail. This is especially true when people have been predicting such failure for so long and with such a poor track record. Thomas Macaulay made this point well:

FIGURE 1.3 The striking improvements in extreme poverty, literacy, child mortality and life expectancy over the last 200 years.37

WHERE WE MIGHT GO

On the timescale of an individual human life, our 200,000-year history seems almost incomprehensibly long. But on a geological timescale it is short, and vanishingly so on the timescale of the universe as a whole. Our cosmos has a 14-billion-year history, and even that is short on the grandest scales. Trillions of years lie ahead of us. The future is immense.

Mammalian species typically survive for around one million years before they go extinct; our close relative, Homo erectus, survived for almost two million.

If we think of one million years in terms of a single, eighty-year life, then today humanity would be in its adolescence—sixteen years old; just coming into our power; just old enough to get ourselves in serious trouble.39