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

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  • The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

    Toby Ord

    Bloomsbury, pp. 480, £20

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.

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