Existential Risks

Goals

Analyze catastrophic threats through probabilistic reasoning and risk assessment frameworks. Evaluate mitigation strategies and uncertainty in forecasting extreme events. Develop informed perspectives on balancing present needs with long-term human survival and flourishing.

Why these books

Toby Ord's The Precipice (2020) is an ideal introduction to existential risk for several reasons that align directly with this course's learning goals.

Ord, a philosopher at Oxford and a founder of the effective altruism movement, begins by doing something deceptively simple: he attempts to actually quantify the probability of various existential catastrophes occurring within the next century. Nuclear war, engineered pandemics, climate change, asteroid impact, and unaligned artificial intelligence are each examined with the same probabilistic framework, forcing the reader to think carefully about how we reason under radical uncertainty. This directly serves the learning goal of applying risk assessment to extreme events.

What distinguishes the book from comparable works is its moral seriousness. Ord argues that existential risks deserve priority not merely because large numbers of people would die, but because extinction or permanent civilizational collapse would destroy everything humanity might ever become — all future generations, all future flourishing. This framing gives the book genuine philosophical depth rather than just analytical sweep.

Ord is also bracingly honest about what we do and don't know, modeling the intellectual humility the subject demands. He does not traffic in either false reassurance or sensationalism.

For students coming to this topic for the first time, The Precipice provides three things simultaneously: a conceptual vocabulary for thinking about catastrophic risk, a survey of the major threat categories, and a compelling ethical argument for why these questions deserve serious and urgent attention. It is rigorous without being inaccessible, and sobering without being paralyzing.