EA Global Bay Area 2024 | The Precipice Revisited | Toby Ord

The five years since Toby Ord wrote The Precipice have seen dramatic changes to the landscape of existential risk. Ord will explore the biggest changes to the biggest risks, showing how new developments have upended key assumptions and pushed some of these risks into new phases. And we’ll see how the world has woken up to the very idea of existential risk, with it becoming an explicit priority and talking point on the global stage.
Toby Ord is a philosopher at Oxford University. His work focuses on the big picture questions facing humanity. What are the most important issues of our time? How can we best address them?
Toby's earlier work explored the ethics of global health and global poverty. This led him to found Giving What We Can, whose 8,000 members have so far donated over 300 million dollars to the most effective charities helping to improve the world. He also co-founded the wider effective altruism movement, encouraging thousands of people to use reason and evidence to help others as much as possible.
His current research is on avoiding the threat of human extinction and thus safeguarding a positive future for humanity, which he considers to be among the most pressing and neglected issues we face. He addresses this in his book, The Precipice.
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