How does AI risk compare?
Asteroids, nuclear war, pandemics, climate change — how does the risk from advanced AI stack up against the other ways this century could go catastrophically wrong? These are philosopher Toby Ord's estimates from The Precipice. Set the AI number to your own view and watch the ranking change.
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Add it all up and Ord's overall estimate for existential catastrophe this century is about one in six — the odds of a single round of Russian roulette. Anthropogenic risks, led by AI, account for nearly all of it; the natural risks our species survived for 200,000 years are now a rounding error.
The estimates are from Toby Ord's The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020), Table 6.1 — his best guesses for the probability that each threat causes an existential catastrophe within the next 100 years. Ord is a philosopher at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and a co-founder of the effective altruism movement.
They are deliberately rough, order-of-magnitude judgments, not measurements — Ord stresses they could be off by a factor of a few. Their purpose is to show the shape of the risk landscape: that the greatest threats are now ones we create ourselves, and that AI sits at the top.
The AI figure is the only one you can change here — because it is the most contested and the one this foundation exists to address. The others are held at Ord's values.
The biggest risks are the ones we build.
For all of history, the threats to humanity came from nature. That has changed. The most serious existential risks this century are of our own making — and AI is the fastest-growing of them. That is why this foundation exists. Get our briefings on the risk and what can be done.