6 ★ FT Weekend 21 March/22 March 2020O
dds of just one in six do not
sound great, even in a sim-
ple game of chance. But if
this were the probability
that humanity itself could
be wiped out, you might say we were in a
fix. Yet here we are, argues philosopher
Toby Ord inThe Precipice, a new book
about the bleak survival chances we
now face as a species.
Those with a penchant for worrying
about catastrophe already have plenty
to be going on with, as thecoronavirus
continues its grim global march, setting
off an array of scary thoughts about
what the coming months might bring.
Churches in the US are now closed, but
newspapers last weekend pictured long
lines outsidegun shops, a sign that
many are preparing in their own way for
broader social disruption to come.
Visions of post-apocalyptic collapse
are familiar from disaster movies, or
novels such as Cormac McCarthy’sThe
Road. Ord’s concern is more with what
he calls “existential” risk: an apocalypse
in which there is no “post”; just the end
of all of us. Hence his calculations of the
chance of human lifeending entirely
during this century: one in six. “This is
not a small statistical probability that
we must diligently bear in mind, like the
chance of dying in a car crash, but some-
thing that could readily occur, like the
roll of a die, or Russian roulette.”
A leading light in a movement known
as“effective altruism”, Ord is also a
researcher at the University of Oxford’s
Future of Humanity Institute, which
(given his own odds-making) must be a
pretty bleak place to work. His book tal-
lies up various apocalyptic scenarios,
from asteroid strikes to the one in
1,000m chance of a “stellar explosion”
in space taking the Earth with it. More
alarming are theman-made “anthropo-
genic” threats, specifically climate
change, broader environmental col-
lapse, nuclear war, biotechnology and
artificial intelligence.
These risks are new, coming together
in the latter 20th century to create an
era that Ord dubs “the precipice”, mean-
ing one in which total human collapse
remains alarmingly likely. “If I’m even
roughly right about their scale, then we
cannot survive many centuries with risk
like this,” he writes. “Either humanity
takes control of its destiny and reduces
the risk to a sustainable level, or we
destroy ourselves.”
Many might quibble withthe exacti-
tude of Ord’s probabilities, but his mes-
sage about the rising likelihood of civili-
sational disruption is grimly convincing
— all the more so for being delivered in
admirably clear prose. Of his various
apocalyptic horsemen, he worries most
of all about “unaligned artificial intelli-
gence”, giving odds of one in 10 to thenotion that futureintelligent machines
might wipe out their human underlings
— a scenario that has also alarmed the
likes of the late scientist Stephen Hawk-
ing and entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Pandemics are his second-biggest
fear, and he recalls how the Black Death
wiped out as many as half of all Europe-
ans during the 14th century — or the
earlier Plague of Justinian that swept
through the Byzantine Empire in
541CE, reducing humanity’s headcount
by 3per cent. By comparison, today’s
coronavirus outbreak is mild, although
it provides a taste of the massive disrup-
tion a more lethal strain might bring.
The real risk here, however, is man-
made, specifically a bioweapon or lab-
mutated virus. Back in 2012, Dutch
virologistRon Fouchier an an experi-r
ment with H5N1, an especially deadly
strain of bird flu that kills more than
half of the humans it infects, albeit one
that so far has not been transmissible
between humans. “He passed the dis-
ease through a series of ten ferrets,” Ord
writes. “By the time it passed to the final
ferret, his strain of H5N1 had become
directly transmissible between mam-
mals.” Even putting the risk of military
bioweapons to one side, Fouchier’s
experiment caused an outcry, underlin-
ing the potential for disaster.
Chaotic hospital scenes in Wuhan and
Lombardy make such risks easier to
imagine. Yet they do not solve the wider
problem: namely that most of us find it
all too easy to ignore thosethat might
bring about a temporary social collapse,
let alone a humanity-ending disaster.
Oliver Letwin’sApocalypse How?
sketches out just one scenario, in which
a fictional freak “space weather” mag-
netic pulseknocks out Britain’s internet,
electricity and other vital networks on
New Year’s Eve 2037, causing chaos and
tens of thousands of deaths. A brainy
formerminister uringd David Cam-
eron’s premiership, Letwin was once in
charge of Britain’s disaster prepared-
ness, thinking through everything from
natural catastrophes to malign outside
interference, similar to Russian cyber
attacks that knocked out Ukraine’s
power supplies in 2015 and 2016.
His bigger argument concerns the ris-
ing vulnerability of sophisticated indus-
trialised societies, given the complex
interlocking technological networks
that already underpin almost all of our
social systems. In the near future, when
everything from telemedicine to self-
driving vehicles will be hitched up
online, the risks of a cascading network
collapse will be greater still. “If the elec-
tricity grid and the internet go down in
the late 2030s, and if we have not taken
very particular precautions, it is likely
that life as we know it will close down
too,” Letwin writes.Similar worries vex Pablo Servigne
and Raphaël Stevens — albeit on a
grander scale — inHow Everything Can
Collapse. First published in 2015 and
only now translated from French, the
duo are leftwing activists and research-
ers in a developing field they describe
half-jokingly as “collapsology”. This
covers plenty of ground, from the risks
of fossil fuel-dependent energy systems
to instability in international finance.
But their concern is primarily ecologi-
cal, namely the overburdening of the
Earth’s natural systems, from the cli-
mate crisis to the collapse in biodiver-
sity that now forces some farm workers
in China to manually pollinate plants,
given declining numbers of bees.
Five mass extinctions have scarred
our planet’s 4.5bn-year history, the
most recent wiping out the dinosaurs
65m years ago. Some scientists believe
extensive habit and species destruction
is now causing a sixth “Holocene extinc-
tion”, meaning one in which three quar-
ters of species disappear. “We are notthere yet but we are rapidly getting
closer to this figure,”the authors write.
All these more contemporary potent-
ial disasters share a common feature —
namely that they result at some level
from the intersection of globalisation
and technology. This is true for the coro-
navirus outbreak, given that its rapid
global spread was largely a function of
greater global transport integration,
even since the outbreak of Sarsearlier
this century. Globalisation has brought
huge benefits, but also levels of human
interconnection and environmental
strain that make now truly global catas-
trophes much easier to imagine.
The word apocalypse derives from the
Greekapokalyptein, meaning to uncover
or to reveal — a well-chosen root, given
the way thinking about disaster so often
reflects anxieties about the present.
Religious apocalyptic visions focus on
blinding flashes from vengeful deities,
something replaced in the last century
by the potential wipeout of a nuclear
strike. Today’s visions of collapse are
more gradual, be that aspreading pan-
demic or the remorseless warming of
our planet. “Today, climatic and envi-
ronmental catastrophes are less spec-
tacular, but they have actually started,”
Servigne and Stevens suggest.How should we prepare for such a
possibility? Some take matters into
their own hands,the subject of Mark
O’Connell’sNotes from an Apocalypse, a
delightful peek inside the world of
“preppers” gearing up for imminent dis-
ruptions to our social or political order.
From renovated nuclear bunkers being
sold towell-heeled survivalists n Northi
Dakota, tonuclear disaster tourists in
Chernobyl, O’Connell’s book, published
next month, is a wryly amusing tour of
the end of the world.
Over recent weeks a handful of Asian
nations such as Taiwan and Singapore
have seemed like sanctuary states, hold-
ing out against the virus’s spread. But for
those truly anxious about looming
catastrophe, there is always New Zea-
land. PayPal founder Peter Thiel isjust
one of a bunch of libertarian billionaires
and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to buy
land and houses in New Zealand, which
O’Connell describes as “the ark of
nation-states, an island haven amid a
rising tide of apocalyptic unease”.
He is especially good on the oddities of
American survivalists: an almost exclu-
sivelymale subculture hat revels int
packing meticulous “bug out bags”
filled with survival gear, and hangs out
oninternet discussion boards chatting
about “TEOTWAWKI” [the end of the
world as we know it], or the correct
course of action when “TSHTF” [You
probably can guess that one].
All this reflects a deep anxiety about
the direction of complex liberal urban
societies. “Preppers are not preparing
for their fears: they are preparing for
their fantasies”, he writes. “The collapse
of civilisation means a return to modes
of masculinity our culture no longer has
much use for, to a world in which a man... can build a toilet from scratch — or
protect his wife and children from
intruders using a crossbow.”
This might seem ridiculous, and
O’Connell has plenty of fun treating it as
such. But it merely begs the question of
what sensible measures should be taken
to prepare instead, especially when poli-
ticians find it so hard to focus on risks
that are low-probability and complex,
or those, such as climate change, whose
full effects will not be feltfor decades.
Servigne and Stevens glimpse hope in
the “transition town” movement, a low-
carbon community effort to build local
self-sufficiency in advance of future dis-
aster. They would almost certainly find
much to admire inExtinction Rebellion,
whose calls for radical travel limits and
sharply reduced consumption look
remarkably like the results of the cur-
rent coronavirus lockdown.
More alarmingly, the duo flirt with the
ideas of“collapsniks”: thinkers who
want deliberately to engineer economic
collapse nowin a perverse attempt to
forestall even worse environmental
catastrophes later. The dangers of this
approach should be clear enough from
the genuine crisisspreading around the
world over recent weeks, not least in
terms of the extreme political backlash
it would create. As Letwin argues: “Lib-
eral democracies are fragile, demagog-
uery is latent, and there is every reason
not to test whether the liberal demo-
cratic system would prove robust in the
face of calamity on this scale.”
Letwin himself is more practical, sug-
gesting greater international co-oper-
ation, in particular a new UN conven-
tion on global network protection. His
other big idea is more old-fashioned,
specifically that governments should
invest in basic back-up networks from
ham radios to old-fashioned 2G telecom
networks that could kick in during a
temporary period of crisis — “‘make-do-
and-mend’ systems that will just about
get us by when the all-singing, all-danc-
ing first-best technology fails”.
Ord’s ideas are mostly practical too,
involving new international efforts to
handle existential risks, as well as poli-
cies to slow down and manage the devel-
opment of risky technologies, not least
AI. Much of this boils down to money.
Theglobal body overseeingprohibition
of bioweapons has an annual budget of
just over $1m. He notes: “Humanity
spends more on ice cream every year
than on ensuring that the technologies
we develop do not destroy us.”
Changing this requires far more
investment for expert-led global bodies
such as theWorld Health Organisation,
which in any case should emerge in the
coming years with many more
resources, as well as theIntergovern-
mental Panel on Climate Change. Amid
the horrendous human cost, one wel-
come result of the ongoing pandemic
should be that some of the feverish sce-
narios imagined by survivalists should
be a little easier for the rest of us to imag-
ine too. Just as important, though, is the
realisation that actions from lone indi-
viduals are hopeless replacements for
preparation that is well-resourced, col-
lective and global.
Existential destruction would, by def-
inition, be unprecedented. Yet our
world is still littered with the ruins of
once-thriving civilisations that did at
some point come to an end, mostly for
reasons that modern societies are in a
position to prevent. Our own chances of
survival may well prove to be much
greater than one in six. But the odds of
serious disaster are also far higher than
most of us would like to think.James Crabtree is associate professor in
practice at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew
School of Public Policy, and author of
‘The Billionaire Raj’The complex interlocking
technological networks
that underpin ourindustrialised societies
actually make usincreasingly vulnerable
The Precipice: Existential Risk
and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord
Bloomsbury £25, 480 pagesApocalypse How?
Technology and the
Threat of Disaster
by Oliver Letwin
Atlantic £14.99, 256 pagesNotes from an Apocalypse:
A Personal Journey to the
End of the World and Back
by Mark O’Connell
Granta £14.99, 258 pagesHow Everything Can Collapse
by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens
(translated by Andrew Brown)
Polity £14.99, 250 pagesWhen things fall apart
Essay Deserted streets, hospitals at breaking point, economies in turmoil — the coronavirus crisis reminds us|
that our civilisation rests on fragile foundations.JamesCrabtree n the risks facing humanity in the 21st centuryo
Above: a commuter
wears a protective
glove on a New York
subway train,
March 17, 2020
Chang W Lee/The New York Times/eyevineLife & Literature Life under lockdown
MARCH 21 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 3/202019/ - 17:19 User:matthew.brayman Page Name:WKD6, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 6, 1