Humanity's potential is worth preserving, he argues, not because we are so great now but because of the possibility, however small, that we are a bridge to something far greater.
...There are the natural risks we’ve always lived with, such as asteroids, super-volcanic eruptions, and stellar explosions. “None of them keep me awake at night,” Ord writes. Then there are the large-scale threats we have created for ourselves: nuclear war, climate change, pandemics (which are made more likely by our way of life), and other novel methods of man-made destruction still to come. Ord is most concerned about two possibilities: empowered artificial intelligence unaligned with human values (he gives it a one-in-ten chance of ending humanity within the next hundred years) and engineered pandemics (he thinks they have a one-in-thirty chance of bringing down the curtain). The pandemic we are currently experiencing is the sort of event that Ord describes as a “warning shot”—a smaller-scale catastrophe that, though frightening, tragic, and disruptive, might also spur attempts to prevent disasters of greater magnitude in the future.
Unlike doomsday preppers who seem, on some level, to relish the idea of social breakdown, Ord believes in humanity’s potential for greatness...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/how-close-is-humanity-to-the-edge
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