Toby Ord > Quotes

“Consider a child with high longterm potential: with futures open to her in which she leads a great life. It is important that her potential is preserved: that her best futures aren’t cut off due to accident, trauma or lack of education. It is important that her potential is protected: that we build in safeguards to make such a loss of potential extremely unlikely. And it is important that she ultimately fulfills her potential: that she ends up taking one of the best paths open to her. So too for humanity.”
― Toby Ord

“Indeed, when I think of the unbroken chain of generations leading to our time and of everything they have built for us, I am humbled. I am overwhelmed with gratitude; shocked by the enormity of the inheritance and at the impossibility of returning even the smallest fraction of the favor. Because a hundred billion of the people to whom I owe everything are gone forever, and because what they created is so much larger than my life, than my entire generation.”
― Toby Ord

“Consider, for example, how little we know of how ultraviolet light looks to a finch; of how echolocation feels to a bat, or a dolphin; of the way that a red fox, or a homing pigeon, experiences the Earth’s magnetic field. Such uncharted experiences exist in minds much less sophisticated than our own. What experiences, possibly of immense value, could be accessible, then, to minds much greater? Mice know very little of music, art or humor. Toward what experiences are we as mice? What beauties are we blind to?”
― Toby Ord

“One way of looking at our current predicament is that the existing global order splits humanity into a large number of sovereign states, each of which has considerable internal coherence, but only loose coordination with the others. This structure has some advantages, even from the perspective of existential risk, for it has allowed us to minimize the risk that a single bad government could lock humanity into a terrible stable outcome. But as it becomes easier for a single country—or even a small group within one country—to threaten the whole of humanity, the balance may start to shift.”
― Toby Ord

“What makes each of us special, so worthy of protection and celebration is something subtle about us, in the way that the matter of which we are comprised has been so delicately arranged as to allow us to think and love and create and dream.”
― Toby Ord

“humanity's attention is scarce and precious, and must not be wasted on flawed narratives or ideas”
― Toby Ord

“When I contemplate the expected timespan that Earth-based life may survive and flourish, the greatest contribution comes from the possibility of humanity turning from its destroyer, to its savior.”
― Toby Ord

“If we steer humanity to a place of safety, we will have time to think. Time to ensure that our choices are wisely made; that we will do the very best we can with our piece of the cosmos. We rarely reflect on what that might be. On what we might achieve should humanity’s entire will be focused on gaining it, freed from material scarcity and internal conflict.”
― Toby Ord

“We might compare our situation with that of people 10,000 years ago, on the cusp of agriculture. Imagine them sowing their first seeds and reflecting upon what opportunities a life of farming might enable, and on what the ideal world might look like. Just as they would be unable to fathom almost any aspect of our current global civilization, so too we may not yet be able to see the shape of an ideal realization of our potential.”
― Toby Ord

“In the months after my daughter was born, the magnitude of everything my parents did for me was fully revealed. I was shocked. I told them; thanked them; apologized for the impossibility of ever repaying them. And they smiled, telling me that this wasn’t how it worked—that one doesn’t repay one’s parents. One passes it on.”
― Toby Ord

“These timespans are humbling when we consider our place in the universe so far. But when we consider the potential they hold for what we might become, they inspire.”
― Toby Ord

“humanity spends more on ice cream each year than ensuring the technologies we develop don't destroy us”
― Toby Ord