Author: Toby Ord

Ord is a philosopher at Oxford who founded Giving What We Can, pledging to give away everything he earned above a modest threshold, and helped start the movement that became effective altruism. The Precipice argues that humanity is in an unusually dangerous century, works through the risks one at a time, and concludes that engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence are considerably more likely to end us than asteroids or nuclear war. He has advised governments and the World Health Organization. The book is careful with its numbers and explicit about how uncertain they are.