Big Problems

I just finished a wild book: The Precipice by Toby Ord. Ord is a statistician and a moral philosopher at Oxford. The book starts with a question “What are the most pressing problems to work on?”. It proceeds through a methodical assessment of the problems facing humanity — where are the biggest risks to humanity?

He defines “existential risk” as anything that would obliterate humanity’s ability to achieve its full potential — not necessarily extinction. He also assesses our ability to meet these risks and progress to date. All of it is very well-researched (hundreds of pages of footnotes) and very careful.

A few notes:

1. Ord makes the case (with math) that the next 100 years are the most consequential in humanity’s history to date, and more consequential than the 100 years that follow that. In other words: this is, statistically speaking, the most dangerous 100 years for humanity: the precipice.
2. Below is a photo of a chart that summarizes a few hundred pages of the book. Note that engineered pandemics, unaligned artificial intelligence, and other “anthropogenic risks” are the highest risks facing humanity. I can provide a lot more color on each of these items.

1. At one point, he notes that the globe spends more on ice cream annually than on mitigation for all of these risks combined.
2. One of the interesting projects he started out of the book is 80000hours.org — You have 80,000 hours in your career. How can you best use them to help solve the world’s most pressing problems?

Toby Ord previously co-founded EffectiveAltruism.org based on Ord’s essay around cost-effective philanthropy (read it here). He also founded Giving What We Can, whose members have pledged over $1.5 billion to the most effective charities helping to improve the world.