by Toby Ord
Ord argues that humanity has entered an unprecedented period of existential risk, estimating a roughly one-in-six chance of civilizational catastrophe this century driven chiefly by engineered pandemics and unaligned AI. He builds an ethical case, rooted in longtermist philosophy, that safeguarding humanity's long-term potential is the defining moral task of our era.
In this collection, The Precipice references 3 other books and is cited by 2 other books.
It draws on Superintelligence, Sapiens and Cosmos.
It’s picked up by The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values and The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma.
Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.
The books Ord references and why each one mattered to the argument.
Ord draws on Bostrom's Superintelligence throughout the AI-risk chapter, adopting Bostrom's definitions of existential catastrophe and his framework for misaligned optimization, and names Bostrom as a key colleague at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute.
Ord situates his long-view within the tradition of Harari's Sapiens, using the deep-time perspective on humanity's emergence to motivate why our descendants' potential dwarfs present concerns.
Ord explicitly invokes Sagan's Cosmos and Sagan's Pale Blue Dot framing to anchor the book's cosmic-scale moral argument about humanity's long-term future.
The exact passages where other authors bring up “The Precipice” and what they take from it.
Engages with Ord's The Precipice argument about existential risk from advanced AI, situating alignment research as one of the most urgent interventions for reducing catastrophic outcomes
Engages with Ord's The Precipice framework on existential risk, arguing that the convergence of AI and synthetic biology creates compounding risks that demand the kind of civilizational-level response Ord advocates
Cited in
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemmaby Mustafa Suleyman
How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.
Directly cites
Directly cited by
Books from completely different categories that share citation overlap with this one. These are the reads you would not find by browsing a single shelf.
Life 3.0
Max Tegmark
Tools of Titans
Tim Ferriss
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff
The Second Machine Age
Erik Brynjolfsson
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Mary Roach
Books with the highest citation overlap within the same categories.
Life 3.0
Max Tegmark
3 shared citations
Superintelligence
Nick Bostrom
2 shared citationsTools of Titans
Tim Ferriss
1 shared citation
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Eric Jorgenson
1 shared citationAstrophysics for People in a Hurry
Neil deGrasse Tyson
1 shared citationThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff
1 shared citationThis book and its direct connections. Hover a node to see its title, click to visit.
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