The Precipice (Toby Ord)
OVERVIEW
The Precipice explores existential risks – risks that threaten humanity’s long-term potential. These come in natural and anthropogenic flavours with asteroids, nuclear war, pandemics, and artificial intelligence being just a few on offer. After doing a bunch of math I don’t understand, Ord puts our combined risk of existential catastrophe over the next century at 1 in 6, with most of that risk coming from human activity. Given this unprecedented level, Ord refers to our time as “the precipice,” a roll of the die away from civilization collapse, dystopia, or extinction.
Most mammalian species survive about 1 million years before going extinct (Homo erectus survived for 2 million). Homo sapiens has been around for 200,000 years, and we’ve only had civilization for the last 10,000 of that. Just think what we could accomplish in the next million years, or billion years! With millions of generations and so much future potential on the line, Ord thinks we have a massive obligation not to screw it up. And if we’re the only complex, self-conscious lifeforms in the entire universe, Ord thinks this obligation is actually of cosmic significance.
So why is this book part of the blog? I wondered, if contemplating my own death has yielded interesting insights, what might contemplating the death of the entire human race yield? Is species-level death anxiety even possible? I’ve been asking myself, if personal death awareness makes us better stewards of our lives (more grateful, more present, more forgiving), can global death awareness make us better stewards of humanity? After reading The Precipice, I think the answer is yes, and with existential risk Ord has given us two key ingredients to this stewardship: a way to expand our “in-group” to include all humans, and a meaningful immortality project to rally behind (see WHAT NOW below). I also love Ord’s idea of “intergenerational cooperation,” and he gives us this beautiful quote: “When I think of the unbroken chain of generations leading to our time and of everything they have built for us, I am humbled. I am overwhelmed with gratitude; shocked by the enormity of the inheritance and at the impossibility of returning even the smallest fraction of the favor. Because a hundred billion of the people to whom I owe everything are gone forever, and because what they created is so much larger than my life, than my entire generation.” If we can expand our sense of belonging to include our entire ancestral lineage and the billions of people not yet born, I think we create more than enough room to hold our current world of 7 billion, and to act with their best interests at heart.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Existential risk as an immortality project
Ord believes that dedicating your career (or charitable contributions) to causes that address existential risk is the most important thing you can do with your time (or money) in the 21st century. So if you are persuaded by Ord’s arguments, and if you’re convinced that working to reduce existential risk is the most pressing task of your generation, this might be a great immortality project. If you’ve read my other reviews, you’ll remember that Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death) and Stephen Cave (Immortality) believed that immortality projects were critical to achieving personal well-being and social cohesion. Becker in particular thought that religious immortality projects were the most robust because they afforded people a sense of cosmic significance. Well, if you’re an atheist, working to safeguard the future of the human race is probably as close as you can get to cosmic significance without magical trappings. What better personal legacy to pursue than to protect trillions of future persons, those who may cure cancer and carry human civilization to the stars? Seems significant enough to me!
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes.
If you had to describe the book in one sentence? There’s a 1 in 6 chance humanity won’t survive the next century: here’s how that could happen and why you should care.
Who should read this book? Anyone interested in existentialism writ large.