#72 - Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity's potential futures
This week Oxford academic and 80,000 Hours trustee Dr Toby Ord released his new book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. It's about how our long-term future could be better than almost anyone believes, but also how humanity's recklessness is putting that future at grave risk — in Toby's reckoning, a 1 in 6 chance of being extinguished this century.
I loved the book and learned a great deal from it (buy it here, US and audiobook release March 24). While preparing for this interview I copied out 87 facts that were surprising, shocking or important. Here's a sample of 16…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.