<aside> 🔍 “So if we drop the baton, succumbing to an existential catastrophe, we would fail our ancestors in a multitude of ways. We would fail to achieve the dreams they hoped for; we would betray the trust they placed in us, their heirs; and we would fail in any duty we had to pay forward the work they did for us. To neglect existential risk might thus be to wrong not only the people of the future, but the people of the past.” - Toby Ord

Humanity appears to face existential risks: a chance that we'll destroy our long-term potential. We’ll examine why existential risks might be a moral priority, and explore why they are so neglected by society. We’ll also look into one of the major risks that we might face: a human-made pandemic, worse than COVID-19.

Alongside this we'll introduce you to the concepts of neglectedness, marginal thinking, and explore whether you could lose all of your impact by missing one crucial consideration.

We’ll also introduce the following concepts:

• The importance, neglectedness, tractability framework: The most important problems generally affect a lot of people, are relatively under-invested in, and can be meaningfully improved with a small amount of work.
• Thinking on the margin: If you're donating $1, you should give that extra $1 to the intervention that can most cost-effectively improve the world. There are many great initiatives with a very high average impact per dollar that will have a low marginal impact because they can't get the same efficiency at scale (they display "diminishing marginal returns").
• Crucial considerations: It can be extremely hard to figure out whether some action helps your goal or causes harm, particularly if you’re trying to influence complex social systems or the long-term. This is part of why it can make sense to do a lot of analysis of interventions you’re considering </aside>

Required Materials

Existential risks:

• Please read Chapter 2 of The Precipice (Book - 35 mins.) Otherwise, read The case for reducing existential risks (25 mins.)

Thinking on the margin:

• Marginal Impact

ITN framework:

• A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact (15 mins.)
• See how 80,000 Hours apply this framework in their profile on climate change (20 mins.)

Risks from pandemics:

• Why experts are terrified of a human-made pandemic — and what we can do to stop it (15 mins.)
• “Future risks” chapter of The Precipice, introduction and “Pandemics” section. Stop at “Unaligned artificial intelligence” (Book - 25 mins.)

Strategies for improving biosecurity:

• Concrete Biosecurity Projects - (7 mins.)
• Biosecurity needs engineers and material scientists (4 mins.)

Crucial considerations:

• Crucial considerations and wise philanthropy (24 mins.)

More to explore

Existential risks

• Policy and research ideas to reduce existential risk - 80,000 Hours **(5 mins.)