In 2020, Oxford academic and 80,000 Hours trustee Dr Toby Ord released his 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.

Toby is a famously good explainer of complex issues — a bit of a modern Carl Sagan character — so we thought this would be a perfect introduction to the problem of existential risks.

Full transcript, related links, and summary of this interview

This episode first broadcast on the regular 80,000 Hours Podcast feed on March 7, 2020. Some related episodes include:

• #81 – Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
• #70 – Dr Cassidy Nelson on the twelve best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit COVID-19)
• #43 – Daniel Ellsberg on the creation of nuclear doomsday machines, the institutional insanity that maintains them, & how they could be dismantled

Series produced by Keiran Harris.

Buckley’s Cave (Classic)