killed about one in 30 people across the world. What would have been truly
unprecedented is if our vulnerability had ended. This catastrophe is simply part of a
very long-running trend.
Yet there is one sense in which our time is without precedent. With the development of
nuclear weapons in the 20th century, humanity’s escalating power finally reached the
point where we could cause catastrophes on the largest possible scale: the destruction
of our own species, and with it, everything we could have achieved or become. Like all
species, we have always been vulnerable to a small background of natural extinction
risks, but these have now been outstripped by risks of our own creation. The existential
risk of nuclear war was soon joined by that of extreme climate change, and this century
will bring even greater risks from advanced biotechnology and artificial intelligence.
Will we wake up to these risks in time, taking the steps needed to control them, or will
we continue to focus on other things until the risks catch up with us? This will be the
defining question of our age—and perhaps of the entire human story.
One of the greatest challenges in managing existential risks is that we have to survive
our entire future without ever falling victim to them. If an existential catastrophe struck,
it would be too late to learn any lessons. We thus have to eke out every possible lesson
we can from the warnings we do receive: the near misses, such as the Cuban missile
crisis of 1962, and the catastrophes that were severe, but survivable, such as the
pandemics of 1346, 1918 and 2020.
We certainly will learn lessons from covid-19, improving our defences against similar
pandemics. And 2021 will be our best chance to do so, when we have recovered just
enough to be able to raise our eyes to the future, but while the shock of the past still
stings. However, without a great effort, I fear we will learn only the narrow lessons—
those that might help prevent a re-run of 2020—while failing to address the
increasingly important threat of engineered pandemics, or the array of other existential
risks we face. This is a rare opportunity to change course, because it won’t be long
before the societal antibodies from this once-in-a-century pandemic begin to fade. We
should make the most of it.
Toby Ord is the author of “The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity”
(Bloomsbury, 2020)
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