The first sixty pages of Precipice are a series of arguments and thought experiments intended to drive home the idea that everyone dying would be really bad. Ord has other metaphors too, and other arguments. Or as the namesake precipice, a place where the road to the Glorious Future crosses a narrow rock ledge hanging over a deep abyss. Ord speculates that far-future historians will remember the entire 1900s and 2000s as a sort of centuries-long Cuban Missile Crisis, a crunch time when the world was unusually vulnerable and everyone had to take exactly the right actions to make it through. We all remember the Cuban Missile Crisis as a week where humanity teetered on the precipice of destruction, then recovered into a more stable not-immediately-going-to-destroy-itself state. He uses a different one – the Cuban Missile Crisis. Maybe we should consider all counterbalancing considerations – “sure, global warming might be bad, but we also need to keep the economy strong!” – to be overwhelmed by the crushing weight of the future. Even more seriously than we would take them just based on the fact that we don’t want to die. And that would mean taking existential risks (“x-risks”) – disasters that might completely destroy humanity or permanently ruin its potential – very seriously. So maybe we should do the equivalent of not motorcycling. However awed Adam and Eve would have been when they considered the sheer size of the future that depended on them, we should be equally awed. Between Eden and today, the population would have multiplied five billion times between today and our galactic future, it could easily multiply another five billion. Even with conservative assumptions, the galaxy could support quintillions of humans. We have another five billion years until the sun goes out, and 10^100 until the universe becomes uninhabitable. The potential future of the human race is vast. Ord argues that 21st century humanity is in much the same situation as Adam. Maybe you and Eve should hide, panicked, in the safest-looking cave you can find. All of the triumphs and tragedies of humanity, from the conquests of Alexander to the moon landings, would come to nothing if you hit a rock and cracked your skull. Millions of people would never meet their true loves, or get to raise their children. Every song ever composed, every picture ever painted, every book ever written by all the greatest authors of the millennia would die stillborn. A fatal injury to either of you would snuff out the entire future of humanity. Do you go?īefore you do, consider that you’re not just risking your own life. And it would help take your mind off that ever-so-tempting Tree of Knowledge. You know motorcycles can be dangerous, but you’re an adrenaline junkie, naturally unafraid of death. It turns out the Garden of Eden has motorcycles, and Eve challenges you to a race. Imagine you were sent back in time to inhabit the body of Adam, primordial ancestor of mankind. So Ord’s PR person asked me to help spread the word, and here we are. The score is still gods one zillion, prophets zero. All the newspapers and journals and so on that would usually cover an exciting new book were busy covering the pandemic and economic collapse instead. Nobody was buying books anyway, on account of the economic collapse. He couldn’t go on tour to promote it, on account of the pandemic. His book came out March 3, 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic and economic collapse. He spent years writing his magnum opus The Precipice, warning that humankind was unprepared for various global disasters like pandemics and economic collapses. Unfortunately for him, Oxford philosopher Toby Ord is a true prophet. Jocasta heard a prediction that she would marry her infant son Oedipus, so she left him to die on a mountainside – ensuring neither of them recognized each other when he came of age. Zechariah predicted the Israelites would rebel against God they did so by killing His prophet Zechariah. The Oracle of Delphi told Croesus he would destroy a great empire, but when he rode out to battle, the empire he destroyed was his own. The gods find some way to make their words come true in the most ironic way possible, the one where knowing the future just makes things worse. It’s the true prophets who have to watch out. It is a well known fact that the gods hate prophets.įalse prophets they punish only with ridicule.
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