Toby Ord

Toby Ord is an Australian philosopher at the University of Oxford who works on existential risk, moral uncertainty and global poverty. In 2009 he founded Giving What We Can, whose members pledge to give at least ten per cent of their income to effective charities, and he is one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. He was a senior research fellow at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. The Precipice (2020) argues that humanity has entered a period of unusually high risk to its long-term future and that safeguarding that future is a central moral task.

Key ideas

• An existential catastrophe would destroy not only present lives but humanity's entire long-term potential.
• Risks we create ourselves, such as engineered pandemics and unaligned AI, now far exceed natural risks such as asteroids.
• Ord estimates roughly a one in six chance of existential catastrophe this century.
• Those who are well off can do great good by giving a significant share of their income to effective charities.

Major works

• The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020)
• Moral Uncertainty (2020)

In the Book corner

• The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity 2020 · Beginner
  A book on existential risk: events that would destroy humanity's long-term potential, through extinction, an unrecoverable collapse of civilisation or a permanent…

In the conversation

No topics yet. Start one about this thinker.