Tom Chivers

How close is humanity to destroying itself?

Whether we unleash a killer virus or AI gets the better of us, we’re moving towards the precipice, says Toby Ord

Humanity has come startlingly close to destroying itself in the 75 or so years in which it has had the technological power to do so. Some of the stories are less well known than others. One, buried in Appendix D of Toby Ord’s splendid The Precipice, I had not heard, despite having written a book on a similar topic myself. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a USAF captain in Okinawa received orders to launch nuclear missiles; he refused to do so, reasoning that the move to DEFCON 1, a war state, would have arrived first.

Not only that: he sent two men down the corridor to the next launch control centre with orders to shoot the lieutenant in charge there if he moved to launch without confirmation. If he had not, I probably would not be writing this — unless with a charred stick on a rock.

It is one of several such stories, most nuclear-related but some not (for example, a top-security British lab accidentally releasing foot-and-mouth virus via a leaky pipe and causing a second outbreak, showing the limits of our biosecurity measures), illustrating how easily we could have dealt ourselves some unrecoverable blow. Some are truly chilling. But Ord’s point is that although we have come through the most dangerous time for humanity so far, greater dangers probably lie in the future.

‘Atishoo, atishoo — put on your head-protectors, elbow- and knee-pads and use the mats provided — we all fall down!’

The author, an Oxford philosopher, is concerned with existential risks: risks not just that some large percentage of us will die, but that we all will — or at least that our future will be irrevocably lessened. He points out that although the difference between a disaster that kills 99 per cent of us and one that kills 100 per cent would be numerically small, the outcome of the latter scenario would be vastly worse, because it shuts down humanity’s future.

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