Toby Ord on existential risk, Donald Trump, and thinking in probabilities

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2020

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Oxford philosopher Toby Ord spent the early part of his career spearheading the effective altruism movement, founding Giving What We Can, and focusing his attention primarily on issue areas like global public health and extreme poverty. Ord’s new book The Precipice is about something entirely different: the biggest existential risks to the future of humanity. In it, he predicts that humanity has approximately a 1 in 6 chance of going completely extinct by the end of the 21st century. Wait! Stay with me! The coronavirus pandemic is a reminder that tail risk is real. We always knew a zoological respiratory virus could become a global pandemic. But, collectively, we didn’t want to think about it, and so we didn’t. The result is the reality we live in now. But for all the current moment’s horror, there are worse risks than coronavirus out there. One silver lining of the current crisis might be that it gets us to take them seriously, and avert them before they become unstoppable. That’s what Ord’s book is about, and it is, in a strange way, a comfort. This, then, is a conversation about the risks that threaten humanity’s future, and what we can do about them. It’s a conversation about thinking in probabilities, about the ethics of taking future human lives seriously, about how we weigh the risks we don’t yet understand. And it’s a conversation, too, about something I’ve been dwelling on watching President Trump choose to ratchet up tensions with China amidst a pandemic: Is Trump himself an existential risk, or at least an existential risk factor? Book recommendations: Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit Doing Good Better by William MacAskill Maps of Time by David Christian and William H. McNeill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	A hundred billion people who came before us over 10,000 generations and everything that
0:06.6	they did for us to build up our world.
0:09.7	If we were to go extinct through our own actions or lack of doing anything about it, we would
0:15.5	be the worst of these 10,000 generations.
0:30.0	Hello and welcome to the Ezerklaunch on the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:33.0	My guest today is Toby Orr, a philosopher and Oxford University, the co-founder of the giving
0:37.6	what we can movement the co-founder of the effective altruism movement and the author of the new book,
0:42.2	The Pressapist. The pressapist is a book on the
0:45.0	cheery topic of existential risk. Risks that could not just destroy some of us, but all of us,
0:49.9	all humanity going all the way forward, all civilization going all the way forward, could wipe out
0:55.2	potential and life on a scale that we don't even really know how to imagine. And if that doesn't
1:00.6	sound at this exact moment, like the conversation you feel like hearing, give it a chance.
1:05.6	Because one thing that coronavirus should do is refocus us on tail risk.
1:10.4	I mean the past couple of decades should, the financial crisis wasn't a risk nobody could imagine,
1:14.9	it's just when they didn't take seriously. For many people Donald Trump getting elected,
1:19.1	was something they knew was there possible, but they didn't take it seriously. And then of course,
1:23.8	a respiratory flu becoming a global pandemic, we knew about that. I mean, hell, we had a Netflix
1:28.4	explained episode about it last year, but certainly in our policy and public policy and even in
1:33.5	journalism, we didn't take what we knew to be a risk seriously enough. And I think one thing
1:38.8	that should do is focus us and get us to listen to the people who really have been thinking about
1:44.0	the risks that could be worst for humanity and have been thinking about what it would mean to take
1:48.5	them seriously, what it would mean to prepare for them. Or it has been studying these four years,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Vox Media Podcast Network, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Vox Media Podcast Network and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.