About the course
Acknowledgements
Toby Ord’s book and ideas
The most important acknowledgement for this class is to Toby Ord. This course builds on Toby Ord’s The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity in two important ways. First, the book is assigned as readings throughout this course, and is the most frequently used source text in the course. Many assignments ask the student to read selections from The Precipice, and the book is read in full throughout the course. Second, the structure of the book strongly informed the overall structure of the course, with an initial treatment of what existential risks are (Module 1) and why we should care about them/how we should think about them generally (Module 2), followed by an exploration of specific existential risks (Module 3) in exactly the order used by Ord, concluding with existential risk from AI (Module 4). The course differs from the book in several ways. First, as a course-length treatment of the topic, it is able to go into far greater depth and draw on many additional sources. Second, as a course developed by an economist the course goes much further in exploring the role of ideas from economics and risk management in understanding existential, using existential risk to teach the student about key related ideas.
We thank Toby Ord and Nate Baum for their suggestions.
Ord, Toby (2020). The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. London: Bloomsbury.
Course contributions
Professor Stephen H. Shore originally designed and led the course. Abbad Ali and Suyog Thengale helped develop the online version and contributed to selected modules. Abbad worked primarily on artificial intelligence and humanity’s future and subsequently prepared the public version.
See the Team page for individual roles and profiles, and the Reference Shelf for the sources used throughout the course. I am also grateful for the many authors and creators who produced publicly-available materials that are linked to in the course, a list of whom can be found in the Reference Shelf.