Falling off the precipice

Back in February I read the review of the book of reference 2 at reference 1: a study of threats to human existence. Rather more recently there were the spin-offs at references 3, 4 and 5. Now we come to the book itself.

For my money, I got near 500 pages of book, of which around half make up the text proper. Then we have the appendices, the notes, the bibliography and the index. And lots of acknowledgments – so maybe Ord didn’t have to actually read all the many books and papers listed. 

Another book with a breezy style, slightly irritating in the way of reference 6. Also irritating in its poor standard of book production – which one often seems to get when academics write books for the mass market. Maybe being typeset in India didn’t help. Furthermore, in my copy, about 30 pages got bound about a centimetre higher than they ought to have been, being lopped at the top and leaving a gap at the bottom. Unsightly rather than damaging, in any case past the end of the text proper. An unusual thing to happen, with the last such incident that I can remember being a large block of pages printed on slightly pink paper in my copy of the Mardrus & Mathers translation of the Arabian Nights, in one of the four or five volumes bought new in Norwich maybe forty years ago, and long since culled in favour of an antique copy of the Burton translation from the Charing Cross Road.

Partly in order to keep the discussion, to keep the book, within bounds, Ord concentrates on what he calls existential threats: threats which, if they turned into facts, we would not recover from. The human race, even if it survived, would be locked down in some bad place and would never achieve its potential. Killing hundreds of millions of people does not, of itself, qualify. So what is the chance of any such threat turning into fact in the next hundred years? 

By page 167, Ord comes up with the chance of a natural catastrophe – for example an asteroid strike or a massive volcanic eruption – the stuff of lock-down disaster movies from the depths of Freeview – in the next hundred years of 1 in 10,000. Part of the thinking here is that humans have been around for 200,000 years and nothing of this sort has happened so far. So why would it happen tomorrow, so as to speak? But he comes up with the chance of an unnatural catastrophe – something caused by our own actions – of 1 in 6, with the biggest single element of this being artificial intelligence getting out of hand at 1 in 10. With some biological weapon getting out of hand coming a not very close second.

One might argue about the details, but the conclusion seems right. We are much more likely to do ourselves in than to succumb to what to used to be called an Act of God. And given the costs of getting it wrong, it might be a good idea if the world – individual efforts are unlikely to be enough – were to put some good people to work on this, to try to plot a course which will keep us off the rocks. And if was up to me, I would set the bar a bit lower than Ord does with his existential threats.

We are reminded in several places that the life span of large animals like ourselves has, in the past anyway, been of the order of a million years. So species X does alright for a while, then the world moves on and it dies out, its niche being filled by some other species – singular or plural. Which is a sobering thought, even if we are an unusual animal who can perhaps look forward to an unusual future.

That said, I found most of the discussion of the distant future – tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years into the future – towards the end of the book, tiresome. Didn’t do anything for me. Notwithstanding, I found myself this morning, prompted by the very same material, brewing up another spin-off. From where I associated to a point I have made on a number of occasions: the point that a writing, be it a book, an article, a paper or even a page on the Internet, considered as a work of art, can be of poor quality. But it can, at the same time, be thought provoking and useful. Seminal even. Or, as in the this case, just a poor bit of book production. Not the sort of thing at all which will make the cut in the antiquarian book shops of the future; unlike, for example, the book from Harvard’s Belknap Press at reference 11. Which prompts me to add that a lot of the books produced by university presses in the US are well produced; they set a higher standard than our own. And all this works in the other direction, as, for example, in the well known play ‘Much Ado about Nothing’.

In sum, a bit disappointing. But I got my money’s worth, not least from the three spin-offs. With another maybe to follow.

PS 1: inside the front cover we have a wood engraving of a suitably scary looking footpath, winding its way along a massive face of rock, the work of one Hilary Paynter, a wood engraver whose career very much parallels that of my artistic uncle, in that she had a serious career in education as well as producing a lot of engravings. A lot of which go in for greys and textures which I would have thought difficult, given the medium; perhaps she has some cunning tools or techniques which I know not of. The engraving above is another of hers.

PS 2: this book was a product of the Oxford centre for existential studies (reference 8). Can we expect the Cambridge centre (reference 9) to come up with a competing version?

References

Reference 1: The Power of Catastrophic Thinking – Jim Holt/NYRB – 2021. 

Reference 2: The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity – Toby Ord – 2021.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-cautionary-tale.html. Spin-off one. A problem with rabbits.

Reference 4: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/biosecurity-in-uk.html. Spin-off two. A problem with foot and mouth disease.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/05/fake-118-or-manufacturing-faces.html. Spin-off three. Artificial intelligence getting out of hand?

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/zero.html.

Reference 8: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/. The Oxford centre for existential studies.

Reference 9: https://www.cser.ac.uk/. The Cambridge centre for existential studies.

Reference 10: http://hilarypaynter.com/. 

Reference 11: The Tree of Life: a Phylogenetic Classification – Lecointre and Le Guyader – 2006. Vaguely appropriate to the rather apocalyptic tree at the head of this post.