Book Review: The Precipice

Post Date May 09, 2022
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Book review of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, by Toby Ord, Hachette Books, 2020.

The new book The Precipice by Toby Ord provides a wide-ranging survey of topics related to global catastrophic risk. Compared to other books on global catastrophic risk, The Precipice stands out for its depth of discussion, its quality of scholarship, and its readability. However, the book errs in its emphasis on only the most extreme global catastrophe scenarios, its strong belief in the resilience of civilization, and …

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Quantifying the Probability of Existential Catastrophe: A Reply to Beard et al.

Post Date August 10, 2020
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A major challenge for work on global catastrophic risk and existential risk is that the risks are very difficult to quantify. Global catastrophes rarely occur, and the most severe ones have never happened before, so the risk cannot be quantified using past event data. An excellent recent article by Simon Beard, Thomas Rowe, and James Fox surveys ten methods used in prior research on quantifying the probability of existential catastrophe. My new paper expands on the …

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