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April 20, 2020: Toby Ord, author, "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity"

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Tonight: Toby Ord, author, "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity"

About Toby Ord:

• Toby's book: The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

• Toby's websites: tobyord.com and theprecipice.com

• Toby on Twitter: @tobyordoxford

• Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute

• Toby also founded Giving What We Can, encouraging "effective altruism."

Tech news:

• Google's former CEO hopes the coronavirus makes people more "grateful" for Big Tech (by Teddy Schleifer in Recode, Apr 14): Eric Schmidt, on a livestream to the Economic Club of New York, said: "Think about what your life would be like in America without Amazon, for example. The benefit of these corporations — which we love to malign — in terms of the ability to communicate ... the ability to get information, is profound — and I hope people will remember that when this thing is finally over. ... So let's be a little bit grateful that these companies got the capital, did the investment, built the tools that we're using now and have really helped us out. Imagine having the same reality of this pandemic without these tools." (See also Teddy's thread on the speech.)

• Apple and Google's Coronavirus Tracking Plan Is a Symptom of Their Power (by Jordan Pearson in Motherboard, Apr 15): "In the absence of a competent government response to the virus, and within a fragile and precarious economic system, politicians seem primed to put their faith in what Google and Apple are proposing because they are proposing something. ... Apple and Google aren't the first entities to propose such a scheme, but their power makes it nearly impossible for anybody but them to do it effectively. ... Apple and Google's proposal is utterly predictable given that the last decade-plus has been defined by the slow acclimation to constant tracking and surveillance by corporations and the government, for the often interlocking purposes of 'economy' and 'safety.'"

• Disadvantages of the Google/Apple contact tracing proposal (Rachel Thomas summarizing The Markup coverage, Apr 14): "vulnerable to trolls and spoofing, other apps may try to grab data, long history of supposedly anonymous datasets being de-anonymized, and it relies on testing, which is lacking."

• Will the Pandemic Usher in an Era of Mass Surveillance in Higher Education? (Chronicle of Higher Ed, Apr 14), includes quote from recent Techtonic guest Chris Gilliard: "The pandemic will hasten a 'race to the bottom to a surveillance society, with very little indication that it's going to make people safer,' said Chris Gilliard, a professor of English at Macomb Community College, in Michigan, who studies privacy and digital policy."

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