<
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/how-close-is-humanity-to-the-edge>
"For someone with Ord’s interests, living through a pandemic is an opportunity
to contemplate alternate histories. What might have happened in a world in
which COVID-19 didn’t exist, or was handled differently? What if the virus had
been more deadly? Ord’s book reckons with these divergences on a grand scale,
considering both the grim futures that await us if existential threats to
humanity aren’t addressed and the far more promising outcomes that become
possible if they are. Ord has given the name “the precipice” to our current
phase of history, which, he writes, began at 11:29 A.M. Coördinated Universal
Time, on July 16, 1945—the moment of the Trinity test, when the first nuclear
bomb was detonated. It will end, he suggests, with either a shared global
effort to insure humanity’s continued survival or the extinction of our
species.
Ord places the risk of our extinction during the twenty-first century at one in
six—the odds of an unlucky shot in Russian roulette. Should we manage to avoid
a tumble off the precipice, he thinks, it will be our era’s defining
achievement. The book catalogues many possible catastrophes. There are the
natural risks we’ve always lived with, such as asteroids, super-volcanic
eruptions, and stellar explosions. “None of them keep me awake at night,” Ord
writes. Then there are the large-scale threats we have created for ourselves:
nuclear war, climate change, pandemics (which are made more likely by our way
of life), and other novel methods of man-made destruction still to come. Ord is
most concerned about two possibilities: empowered artificial intelligence
unaligned with human values (he gives it a one-in-ten chance of ending humanity
within the next hundred years) and engineered pandemics (he thinks they have a
one-in-thirty chance of bringing down the curtain). The pandemic we are
currently experiencing is the sort of event that Ord describes as a “warning
shot”—a smaller-scale catastrophe that, though frightening, tragic, and
disruptive, might also spur attempts to prevent disasters of greater magnitude
in the future.
Unlike doomsday preppers who seem, on some level, to relish the idea of social
breakdown, Ord believes in humanity’s potential for greatness. Ord was born in
Melbourne, in 1979, and his interest in existential risk grew out of an early
focus on ethics, health, and poverty. With his Oxford colleague Will MacAskill,
he helped create a school of thought known as “effective altruism”: it holds
that we should use reason and evidence to determine how, as individuals, we can
best use our resources for the greater good. In 2009, Ord founded Giving What
We Can, a society whose members pledge to donate at least ten per cent of their
incomes, in the course of their careers, to charity. By his own accounting,
Ord, who is now forty-one, has given away twenty-seven per cent of his lifetime
earnings. He has pledged to donate the proceeds from “The Precipice” to
organizations working on the problems that the book outlines."
Via Dave Farber.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
