PERSON
Toby Ord
The Oxford moral philosopher who put a number on civilization's existential risk—one in six this century—and argued that unaligned artificial intelligence, not nuclear war or climate change, is the single greatest threat to everything humanity could ever become.
Toby Ord is a moral philosopher who arrived at artificial intelligence the way very few others have: by reasoning carefully about what matters most. Born in Melbourne in 1979 and trained at Oxford under Derek Parfit, Ord built his public reputation not as a technologist but as the founder of
Giving What We Can—pledging to cap his own income and give the surplus to the most cost-effective charities in the world. That same austere arithmetic, applied to the full span of what humanity could become rather than to the immediate suffering of the present, produced his 2020 book
The Precipice, which reframed the entire conversation about catastrophic risk. Ord estimates the probability of an existential catastrophe in the next hundred years at roughly one in six—the odds of Russian roulette—and places
unaligned artificial intelligence at the center of that estimate, rating it at roughly one in ten on its own. His argument is structural: most catastrophes,