Instant Genius - Toby Ord: What are the odds civilisation will survive the century?

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

This week we talk to the philosopher Toby Ord about the end of civilisation as we know it. Ok, it’s not all doom and gloom. As Toby says, he’s an optimistic person, but in his new book The Precipice (£25, Bloomsbury) he explains why we’re at a point in time where we, as a species, are teetering on the edge of extinction. We discuss how much potential us homo sapiens have, what’s putting our continued survival at risk, how civilisation as we know it could come to an end, and what are the odds we’ll see out the century. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Michio Kaku: The future of humanity William Poundstone: Can we really predict when doomsday will happen? John Higgs: Are Generation Z our only hope for the future? Brad Lister: Are we facing an insect apocalypse? Randall Munroe: How do you find the worst solution to any problem? Sir David Attenborough: How can we save our planet? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no.

That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference.

Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal,

combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name or... Audio.com to learn more. The world as a whole is very hard to come up with precise estimates as to how much we're

spending on existential risk. But it's, we can say with confidence that it's less than we're spending on ice cream. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. I'm Alexander McNamara, and this week I talk to the philosopher Toby Ord about the end of civilization as we know it. Okay, it's not all doom and gloom.

As Toby says, he's an optimistic person. But in his new book, The Precipice, he explains why we are at a point in time where we, as a species, are teetering on the edge of extinction. We discuss how much potential us homo sapiens have, what's putting our continued survival at risk, how civilization as we know it could come to an end, and what are the odds we'll actually see out the century. I'm Toby Ort. I'm a philosopher at Oxford University. I'm originally from Australia and have a background in science as well as philosophy, which is somewhat unusual. So in some ways I got into philosophy from computer science because logic is something that studied in both fields. But also, I've always really been interested in ethics. On the larger scales, they're kind of, what are the big questions facing humanity? and how should we act on them? It's the kind of thing that's always interested me and I ended up ultimately moving across

into philosophy and ethics, although in some cases, things like artificial intelligence are coming full circle and I'm having to catch up on where the field is now. Right, okay. And so is that, you know, you say you're talking about the really big questions, we're not talking about like,

on a sort of life scale or global scale, you're going full big universal sort of level. Yeah. So most of ethics or moral philosophy, as we also call it, is about questions at the personal scale. So that you shouldn't lie or steal. Or is it the case that it's wrong to eat meat, for example? So there's a kind of modern question from a personal scale.

But sometimes we ask these broader questions about what's the right thing to do in society? and even questions more recently on a global scale. For example, I've looked extensively at global poverty and global health and what we can do about that as one of the big questions that I've tackled previously. And environmental questions are often asked at that level. But more recently, I've been interested in things going one level further than that. So you might say, how do you do that? well, not just all people in our generation, but thinking about the perspective of humanity

and the 10,000 generations before us and the thousands of or millions of generations that might follow us and trying to ask, how does that change things? So you're looking at it as a sort of like, we are just a point in time of the grand sort of spectrum of human existence? Yeah. So when you're thinking about global ethics, You might be thinking, you know, what should we be doing about climate change or something like that? Or what should the world be doing about global inequality?

And that kind of breaks down to a question about what would be the best pattern of behavior for everyone to be doing and what would be my part in that pattern of behavior? You know, what role would I play? Or you might think, well, given everyone else does what they'll actually do, which is not part of this best pattern of behavior, what should I be doing on the margin to kind of change that? And you can ask those similar questions from this perspective of humanity as well. If humanity really cared about its future and achieving its potential and making sure that it doesn't fall victim to any risks along the way,

what would it be doing differently? And what role in that could I play? Or perhaps if people aren't going to be doing that, then what role could I play in trying to wake humanity up to these risks? So listening to that, I sort of thought about the whole sort of, you mentioned sort of climate change in there. On a very basic level, things like recycling is that we should all recycle more. I need to do a bit more recycling. And I do this sort of thing.

But if everyone else isn't doing enough, then that creates a problem as a whole because not everyone's doing enough. Are you looking at on a sort of humanity level scale? Yeah. Trying to think, yeah, even bigger than questions like that. So I think that if you look at over the last 200,000 years, humanity's been alive, we've had these great changes over that time, particularly by cooperating across time and building up our knowledge, this kind of intergenerational cooperation has enabled us to do these amazing things that we could never have done otherwise.

The technological world around us is required the 100 billion lives that have come before us to make these countless innovations that goes into everything that I can see looking around me at home here. I can see almost no original natural objects. Perhaps my own body is the only example. Everything else has been kind of carved or forged or assembled in some other ways. And each of those things required just so much innovation. and I've become extraordinarily grateful to all of these people who came before me in thinking about this. And there's every possibility of continuing this progress for another 100 billion lives or more ahead of us. I was going to say that's quite an optimistic view of things.

Yeah, I think so. I think generally I'm something of an optimist. And it's this optimistic view that, that makes me concerned about things that could threaten this entire potential. It's because I think the future could be so bright that I'm especially concerned about the risks that we might be facing now. So what sort of, you know, you say the future could be so bright.

What sort of future could we be looking at where we actually sort of achieve this potential? And then, you know, what are the risks towards that goal? So when I think of the potential of humanity, there's the future, I think there's three useful dimensions to think in terms of. One is that the future is very long. You know, it's so much longer than this fleeting present, just as the past is.

You know, as I said, these 10,000 generations of homo sapiens and where, you know, just one of them. But the future could also be even much longer than that. A typical species on Earth survives about a million years. We've lasted 200,000 so far. So you could think of us as in our adolescence, just reached enough power to really get ourselves in trouble, but without the wisdom to really keep that power in check. And without any, in this context, without any adults to really keep us under control. But we could live a lot longer than that.

The horseshoe crab has been around for 450 million years, almost unchanged over that time. And, you know, absent these existential catastrophes that I'm concerned with at the moment, without those, there's not really a fundamental reason why we couldn't last that long. And so the future could be of huge time, and it could also be of immense physical scale. We know that there are more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and that many of these have planets in the habitable zones of those stars. And so we could perhaps scale up, you know, what is possible by factors of billions. And then there are billions of these galaxies throughout the cosmos.

So it's possible that also in terms of physical scale, things could be much larger. And then also in terms of both the quality of our lives, I think, could be much higher. We've made substantial progress. We've doubled our lifespans on average in the world in the last 200 years, and I have made dramatic improvements to things like literacy and prosperity. And we could go much further. I think one useful way to think about it is to think about your peak experiences, how much better these kind of shining moments that occasionally happen are

compared to the humdrum typical moments. And I know that I would trade, you know, my typical experiences are by no means bad. but I would definitely trade thousands of them for the peaks, and that suggests that there's room for much better lives where we spend much more of our time at the peak. So I think that those three dimensions of time and space and quality suggest that we could have a future of almost unimaginable quality compared to the present, and that therefore protecting that future and that potential is of... this really immense importance.

So does that mean that, you know, you say that the horseshoe crab has lasted 450 million years and it's sort of unchanged, whereas I guess homo sapiens, we've changed quite a lot. And you say that we've built on other generations and other generations. So we've got to a point a lot further on, you know, all due respect to the horseshoe crab, you would say that there's more potential for us there in the future. Yeah. We have this immense potential, yeah, in part because of these unique mental abilities that we have, which have enabled us to accumulate cultural knowledge and including scientific knowledge over these generations.

If we just had to rely on one generation, if we weren't able to transmit knowledge across generations, then even a crude iron shovel would be forever beyond our reach. it's only because we've managed to build on the innovations of our ancestors to make these small modifications and then to pass these improved things down to our children that we've managed to reach this scale and that's something that no other animal species has been able to do so that brings me to ask your book is called the precipice now that that sort of sounds as if it's sort of something that we're at a point in time where maybe maybe that's in jeopardy That is exactly right. In that case, the right message has come across.

It's, I think, a uniquely important time in human history, quite possibly the most important time that there has been and will ever be. And this is for a relatively simple reason, which is that if you look at the natural risks to which humanity has been exposed over these 10,000 generations, Those risks can't be all that high or that you couldn't explain why we and other species last as long as we do since we got through about 2000 centuries. It's difficult for the risk to be much more than about one in 2000 per century, or you just don't expect to have lasted this long. So using a slightly more sophisticated version of that argument, we can bound these natural risks, this background level of risk, to quite a low amount per century. But then with humanity's escalating power, you know, this exponentially increasing ability to affect the world around us, in the 20th century with nuclear weapons, this finally reached a point where we're so powerful that we could potentially destroy ourselves. And this power is then showing no signs of slowing down these increases. And I think that in this century, we'll have a substantially higher chance again of destroying.

ourselves, either leading to our extinction or to some other way in which our potential is permanently curtailed, such as an irrevocable collapse of civilization that we could never recover from. So I think, therefore, that we are at this uniquely important time and that when people, this time can't last that long, because if the risks are anything like I think they are, I think that there's about a one in six chance that we don't make it through this century without potential intact. One and six sounds extraordinarily risky.

Yeah, well, some people think that's surprisingly high and some people think it's surprisingly low, depending on perhaps what newspapers they've been reading or something. But if it is in that ballpark, then one can't survive many centuries with risk like that and escalating. So I think that either the time will end because we get our act together. We rise to the challenges,

and we make a concerted effort to bring these risks low and keep them low, or it will end in disaster. But either way, I think it will be a relatively short and critical time in our story, such that if we survive beyond that, in the grand course of human history that follows, I think when people look back in time, that this will be the most important time, you know, probably be a time when lots of their stories are set and where people wonder about, you know, why people took the actions they did in this critical time. And I think that that gives our time an immense meaning as well and meaning in the lives of people alive now,

that how can they act with regards to these unique challenges of our time? There's a lot to one pick there. I have to say, like, just thinking about it is kind of the small period of time that we live in compared to all we've existed, that we're now in has such a big impact on the future. I was just wondering, you say it sort of started with the advent of nuclear weapons. Can you, would you be able to sort of explain why the, why nuclear weapons became such an existential threat to, you know, our life as we know it? Yeah, there's two things there. One is that when the scientists were developing nuclear weapons, Edward Teller, who developed the hydrogen bomb, he had the idea of that, even before they'd actually developed the fission nuclear weapons, the atomic.

bomb. And he was thinking about fusion, which would power it. And he started to wonder that if we could make a fusion reaction work, which is the type of nuclear energy that powers the sun, maybe you would trigger it with a fission bomb to start it off, to trigger the fusion reaction. And then, hang on, maybe the fission bombs that they were trying to build in World War II, maybe they would create an uncontrolled fusion reaction in the atmosphere, fusing the nitrogen in the atmosphere, and creating this fireball that engulfed the entire world. And there were some heated arguments about this. And ultimately, they thought it was unlikely that this would happen. Probably this fireball would cool as it expanded and so become no longer hot enough to be self-sustaining. But they

had trouble ruling it out. In fact, the official report they wrote, you know, classified at the time, said that more research is needed. And yet they did the Trinity test. And even one of the, one of the key figures wrote in his diary at the time when the flash of the bomb was much brighter than expected at the Trinity test, that he thought that that was it, that they had accidentally ignited the atmosphere and destroyed the world. So it was therefore, they thought that It was hard to put a number on it, but they thought that there was a realistic chance this would happen. And so it's kind of crazy that they actually went ahead with that, considering that at the time they did it, Germany had surrendered and Hitler was dead. So they really didn't need to actually go ahead with that.

So that's one aspect. And then the much more well-known aspect, or I should say, it turned out that that wasn't physically possible. So in one sense, there was no risk at all. But in this other sense that's more relevant, they didn't know that. And they, given the best evidence and the best scientists at the time, they were having a lot of trouble ruling it out. And their paper that tried to rule it out was never peer reviewed or exposed to external scrutiny. And they had a lot of internal biases that would make them want to continue with the project. So it didn't really have any external review.

And no political figures actually assessed the decision and, gave it approval. It was just kind of the scientists took into their own hands. But then when, you know, when they created nuclear weapons, there were then these additional worries once we had enough of them that it could cause a nuclear winter. And that's the current threat from nuclear weapons. The idea that the soot from burning cities would rise so high into the atmosphere that it would rise above the level of the clouds into the stratosphere from which it wouldn't be rained out. And then it could last a long time and cause something in the order of five degrees of global cooling on average across the world for a decade or so. And that this

would cause major crop failures and could potentially cause billions of deaths and maybe even a global collapse of civilization or human extinction. So that's the kind of, yeah, that's the kind of concern there. And we're not sure about that. It could be that the effects of nuclear winter are smaller than is envisaged, but they could also be worse. And there's a lot of uncertainty, which doesn't actually make the problem much better. I guess the fact that we don't, we never really want to be in a situation where we can test that raises probably quite the ethical dilemma as to whether, you know, were there ever to be a nuclear war, whether, you know, whether it should go ahead at all. Yes, that's exactly right.

There is this real challenge with these things that when it comes to science, often we only report scientific numbers in science papers when those numbers have been produced by, you know, countless experiments, making sure that error bars are very small and that the numbers are very accurate and could be repeated and objectively tested by other scientists and other labs. But there are some things that are of critical importance and of scientific relevance, such as what would be the level of cooling in the world if you had a global nuclear exchange, which are very important, and we need scientists to work on them, but they can't run a thousand such global nuclear wars

in order to get the numbers more precise. So this does raise substantial methodological challenges about how to produce numbers, how to produce best estimates in those situations, and there surely are some better and worse ways of doing it, and we need the best information we can get despite not being able to ever actually run the test. So it makes me think in your in your book you do describe sort of like you say earlier that there's like a one in six chance that that that you know we might not see through the century and then there are various other disasters both natural and manmade that that that have a sort of waiting uh an odds attached to them how how would you be able to come up with them and how you know how much should we rely on these as being genuine indicators of of our potential future.

Yeah. Look, it's a real challenge. And what I felt when I was writing the book was that there were certain numbers which scientists have established. For example, that there's about one in 120,000 chance of an asteroid greater than one kilometer in size hitting the Earth, which is interesting. But it's not quite the same as what's the chance that we would have human extinction from an asteroid collision, because we don't know the chance that a one-kilometer asteroid hit in the Earth would cause human extinction. So even in a situation as well understood as asteroid risk, there's still this very unknown parameter that also has to go into it. So I do include the most important kind of numbers we can stand by from the scientific evidence.

But I also thought it would be a real shame if I've spent a decade researching these things and a few years, in particular on the book, if I then just didn't tell people what I thought about all of these risks and how I saw them all fitting together. So I am aware that in some cases, like the IPCC on climate change, they try with a lot of these things

to express probabilities in terms of natural language. So they say things like unlikely, and then they associate that with a particular probability range. But I found that that's actually can call was more trouble than it's worth. Because those words, I think, actually are not just measures of probability. They depend on the stakes. There's certain things where, you know, if it's, you know, maybe a 10% chance of rain

tomorrow means it's unlikely to rain tomorrow. But a 10% chance that you would die tomorrow, we wouldn't call that it's unlikely that you'll die tomorrow. So, and in this case, the stakes are so uniquely high. It's even worse than 7 billion people dying. It's losing our entire future. So stakes are uniquely high such that even probabilities of the level of, say, one in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 are extremely important and would be enough to warrant immense action.

So we don't want to give them names like exceedingly unlikely because it's difficult to go to someone and say, hey, we've discovered that the chance of this happening is exceedingly unlikely, which is much higher than we thought it was. And so we should go ahead with all of these measures to protect against it. It sounds kind of stupid. So I did try to actually express these things in numbers, and I'll probably get in trouble for it. But I really felt that it was a, you know, I would be shortchanging the reader if I didn't actually tell them what I thought about all of these things. So that includes things like a one in a million chance of an existential catastrophe via an asteroid or a comet impact.

These are all over the next 100 years. A one in 10,000 chance of all natural risks put together. A one in a thousand chance of either nuclear war or climate change leading to our downfall. And then for new anthropogenic risks that are still on the horizon with new technologies that are still under development, I think that some of the risks are even higher. and I estimate a one in 30 chance of an existential catastrophe due to engineered pandemics and a one in 10 chance due to unaligned artificial intelligence. So they're just a few of the numbers that are my best estimates given a decade of looking into this

and consultation with all of the top experts in the field. It sounds like the biggest risks that we have are, you know, we imagine that earthquakes and volcanoes are bad, But it sounds like the biggest risks that we have are the ones that are very immediate and very human-made. And are they going to be like either now or in the very close future that have been created by us? Yeah, I think that's right. I think that if you take the natural risks and then you move to the current anthropogenic risks, I think that the current anthropogenic risks are about 30 times the background rate from natural risks. And then I think that the risks in the near future, in the next, you know, the coming decades are about 50 times as large again.

So I think that there's a real escalation in the amount of risk here. So presumably we can, you know, we've had natural risks we've known about for a long time because they're part of the natural world and we've evolved next to them. But these human-made risks, it sounds like we should either we should know the risks that they face or be aware of, of what we're creating that could, you know, create these problems. Is there not, you know, should we not be doing something about stopping these happening now? We certainly should. Unfortunately, we're typically doing very little about it. So, I mean, I would certainly forgive people for thinking that, well, this all sounds very heavy.

It's a good thing we've got elected leaders and institutions to be dealing with these things. But unfortunately, when I've spoken to people in government and international institutions, they all tend to think that this is above their pay grade, the idea of spending money to defend the entire Earth and the whole future of humanity. I mean, America does a bit of it with NASA funding for the Space Guard program looking at asteroid defense. I think America still feels strong enough in the world to think. it's not unreasonable that it would play some kind of role of defending the entire world.

But for most countries, that's just not something that they're normally thinking about. And in fact, you can kind of see why, because take a country like the United Kingdom, it has only about 1% of the world's population live in the UK. And so if it's thinking about its own national interests, only about 1% of the good of protecting humanity comes to its own citizens. So you'd expect it to undervalue this by about a factor of 100. And it's even worse when you think about the intergenerational aspect, because only a small number of the people who'd be affected are alive in our generation.

Most of them are still in these countless generations to come. So there's a strong reason to expect it to be undervalued. And the world as a whole is very hard to come up with precise estimates as to how much we're spending on existential risk. But it is, we can say with confidence that it's less than we're spending on ice cream. So I guess that fits into my analogy about us being like an adolescent. You know, the next election cycle would correspond in this analogy to the next five years and where, you know, it's very hard for us to think beyond, sorry, it would correspond to the next

five hours in the lifetime of an adolescent. And it's very hard for us to think beyond that. So we're like this incredibly impulsive and impatient child who is, yeah, is risking its entire future just for the next high. So is there something that we can do about that? Yeah, I think that there is. I think that for particular technologies, that we should be paying much more attention to the governance of these technologies. We often send our brightest young people to work on biotechnology or artificial intelligence, but we send far fewer people to work on the governance of biotechnology or artificial intelligence.

And I think that we need more scientists thinking about this and paying a lot of attention to developing the parts of their field that are protective against the risks and also interfacing with government about governance for the technology or self-governance. And we need more scientifically literate people in government in order to kind of play the other side of this. And that that would be extremely helpful. And I think that we actually, we're a bit slow, but people did rise to the in awareness about nuclear war and the risk of that. In America, near the end of the Cold War, the biggest protest in American history was for nuclear disarmament because of fears of the end of the world. And similarly, with climate change and the protests at the moment, people rightly see that there is some chance of this.

It's not a high chance in terms of it. It's not like 10% chance that climate change could destroy the whole world. But I think it's hard to eliminate the chance that it might do something like that. So I think that people are noticing this with particular risks, but it's important also to actually address the general problem across all of these risks, to realize that we're in this complicated situation where humanity is good at learning from trial and error, but this is a case where we can't afford even a single error for this classification of risk. So how are we going to get through centuries of time without a time?

ever once falling victim to these things. We're going to need new approaches to this, new international institutions to govern some of these technologies. And we need to start thinking about that now. I guess with things like climate change and to some extent AI, we can sort of see what the risks that are, how far the risks away and what they might pose. But future generations, they may have risks that we just can't even contemplate at this point. That is right. And even over the next hundred years, when I'm doing my estimates, I put the chance of an unforeseen form of anthropogenic risk at one in 30. It's almost impossible to estimate that kind of number. But that's based on me

thinking about what would it have been like 100 years ago, trying to classify the risks that we face over the next 100 years. What's the chance I would have missed a major one? Things like that, trying to think about what it would be like doing that at different points in history and then trying to use that to have some idea about the chance of missing big risks in the future. So there could well be new things. And wouldn't it be amazing if we got the world into a state where from the very get-go of development of these new technologies that could pose existential risks, if we also were devoting a huge amount of effort to governance of them and slowing down if we need to, or just continuing but with a large investment in safety, if that will suffice.

And then we might be able to prepare ourselves with that extra knowledge for anything else that might occur. Exactly. Ultimately, at the moment, if we keep subjecting ourselves to substantial risk every century, it's an unsustainable trajectory. Even if you run a one in a hundred chance of risk every century, then on average we only survive 100 more centuries. And we've survived 2,000 so far. So this would mean that we're right near the end of human history because of our actions.

And I think that that would make us, you know, one of the worst generations that have ever lived. But if instead, if we notice that and we rise to these challenges and we put in place the institutions needed in order to safeguard our future, then we could be one of the best generations that's ever lived. That was Toby Ord, whose book The Precipice is out now. If after all of that, you're looking for some lights in these weird and unusual times, we've got an excellent offer you to take advantage of. For anyone who's used to buying their copy of BBC Science Focus magazine from the shops, we've sorted it out so you can get three issues sent directly to your home with no delivery charge risk-free,

and it won't require you starting a direct debit, plus will not 15% off the cover price. If on the other hand you are happy to set up a direct debit, you can get your first six issues for just 99. Head over to buy subscriptions.com and pick the offer that works best for you. Otherwise, please carry on listening out for future episodes of the Science Focus podcast by subscribing, rating and reviewing our show. And have a potter through our back catalogue

of more than 100 fascinating episodes. Until next week, goodbye. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank.