Fascinating and greatly important book. Gave me a much clearer idea on the arguments behind longtermism and was enjoyable to read otherwise. Although, I wish the footnotes were differentiated between "more information" and "citations", since I had to do a lot of flipping back and forth, and I only really cared about the "more information" footnotes. ( )

In a book encompassing nothing less than the entirety of human potential Toby Orb has written a thorough, statistic-laden, intelligent and slightly tepid response to all the things which could go wrong in the worst of all possible nightmares. Asteroids, climate change, nuclear war, volcanos, exploding stars, AI — everything (save one thing) which poses natural or anthropogenic annihilation of all human potential (as opposed to just those threats which could cause the extinction of the species) is gamed out, mathematically and logically. Herein lies the only real problem with the book. In another recent book, The Republican Brain: the Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, Chris Mooney points out that such factual counterpointing rarely has the desired effect. Mooney says:

[…] as for defending reality itself? That’s the trickiest thing of all.

As I’ve suggested, refuting conservative falsehoods does only limited good. There are more than enough conservative intellectuals out there to stand up (sic.) “refute” the refutations, leading to endless, fruitless arguments. And for the general public, those unconvinced or undecided, sound and fury over technical matters is off-putting, and leaves behind the impression that nobody knows what is actually true.

Rather, liberals and scientists should find some key facts—the best facts—and integrate them into stories that move people. A data dump is worse than pointless; it’s counterproductive. But a narrative can change heart and mind alike.

And here, again, is where you really have to admire conservatives. Their narrative of the founding of the country, which casts the U.S. as a “Christian nation” and themselves as the Tea Party, is a powerful story that perfectly matches their values. It just happens to be . . . wrong. But liberals will never defeat it factually—they have to tell a better story of their own.

The same goes for any number of other issues where conservative misinformation has become so dominant. Again and again, liberals have the impulse to shout back what’s true. Instead, they need to shout back what matters.

For the record, I am the one bringing the political divide into the discussion, not Orb, who despite being so thorough and insightful, has failed to recognize the one, previously alluded to, missing existential threat: stupidity, for which we are currently in boundless supply.

It wasn’t because someone came along with the right facts and figures that the German people joined hands with madmen, men so efficient and stunningly pathological in killing that we needed to promote a word to proper status just to describe it. (Holocaust.) No. One of the madmen told them a story and apparently made it irresistible. Because of this, 17 million people were slaughtered. The Precipice is a book of popular nonfiction, and so the oversight is a double-strike against it: first because popular books need a compelling story and, second, because a message this important must be sharp in tooth and claw. Nothing that is here needs to be removed. Ord simply wrote half of a book, forgetting the Dionysian tragedy which should have accompanied the Apollonian luminescence penetrating his subject. His subject is our subject, after all. What could be more important than that? Let’s hope we have future storytellers with sufficient grit for the telling. ( )

The premise of this book is that humanity's future's (potentially) so bright [we] gotta wear shades. Therefore, we must plan for and avoid potential existential risks that could make this bright future impossible to achieve. I give this effort 4 stars because it's well written, researched and documented. Over 200 pages are devoted to detailed notes, appendices, bibliography and an index, which is a definite plus in a work of this type. Clearly this book is well researched and thought out. However, I find the premise that Humanity is an entity with agency and the capacity to be harmed by an existential crisis unconvincing, even if only metaphorical. I'm much more concerned with problems not considered as existential threats by this author: basically problems that cause actual suffering to actual living, sentient beings who no doubt number in the trillions. ( )

"The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject ... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them ... Let us be satisfied with what we have found out, and let our descendants also contribute something to the truth ... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced."
-- Seneca the Younger, 65 CE

The thesis of The Precipice is about how we're on the brink of destroying ourselves if we're not careful. However, I love the above quote because it sets aside the risk narrative for a moment to remind us of what we stand to gain. That the civilization we're building is a contribution from all of us even if few of us will ever appreciate the scale of our collective gift. ( )

Oxford ethics philosopher Ord judges that nothing is more important than safeguarding the existence of far-future human generations (and, I'd hope, transhuman ones) and finds that "the chance of an existential catastrophe striking humanity in the next hundred years is about one in six." He calculates that anthropogenic risks (such as nuclear war, climate change, and rogue AI) outweigh natural ones (such as asteroids and supervolcanoes) by a factor of 1000. It's a major, detailed work -- an important book that can serve either as an average-length semi-popularization, if one just reads the main text, or as somewhat of a scholarly tome, if one takes care to also read all the meaty endnotes (and the 7 appendices).