Chapter 4 of The Precipice in poem form
I missed a session of my Precipice Reading Group, which meant I had to send in a summary of the week’s reading to my facilitator. For some reason I wrote it as a poem.
I do not claim that reading this is better than reading the actual chapter of the book. This poem is not comprehensive, it focuses on the two largest anthropogenic risks discussed in chapter 4. This poem is not endorsed by Toby Ord. Creative licenses were taken for the sake of rhyming. If you have a criticism of the accuracy please make sure to form your criticism in a rhyming stanza that could replace whatever you think is inaccurate. Enjoy!
So many times we’ve come close
To nuclear war
Tomorrow it may come
Knocking down your door
You might be lucky
To be killed right away
For a worse fate awaits
Those not in the way
As the soot rises
Into the sky
The chances of death
Become pretty high
A new ice age descends
And for five years we wait
Freezing and starving
For the darkness to abate
Then ten more years until
The sunlight fully allumes
Our little rock in space
And normal life resumes
While most of us will die
Or be very sad
This could be much worse
And very very bad
For Toby Ord thinks
It is an important distinction
That many deaths is bad
But better than extinction
So who will be left
To preserve the species?
New Zealand, of course
On their island of kiwis
They will peck at their seeds
While a new era harkens
With a bit of light left
As the rest of the world darkens
For the kiwis are neutral
And safe from attack
And live on an island
Where the sky is less black.
If nuclear winter
Does not cause us to expire
We can look forward
To setting earth on fire
For if greenhouses runaway
and we continue to drill oil
Cascading effects
Might cause the oceans to boil
So the earth could become
Unfortunately for us
Uninhabitable to all life
Just like Venus
If that doesn’t occur
A moist greenhouse effect might
Still kill us all off
But leave the oceans in sight
While this is unlikely
According to scientific consensus
It would be so bad
We should still try to prevent this
Even if we stopped
Emitting entirely
More carbon lies dormant
Than we’ve emitted in history
It rests deep in the oceans
And in permafrost
So if current warming releases it
All hope is lost.
Strong upvoted. I’m a huge fan of optimized combinations of words as a communication strategy, and have been for almost two years now.
I think that converting key x-risk ideas into poetry has a ton of potential to produce communication value from the creation of galaxy-brained combinations of words (including solving many problems fundamental to the human mind and human groups, such as the one mentioned in Raemon’s You Get About 5 Words).
I recommend pioneering this idea and seeing how far you can run with it; I think the expected value makes it worth trying, even if there’s a risk that it won’t work out, or that you won’t be the one credited for getting it going.
(As a side note, I also think it’s valuable to say at the beginning whether LLM generation was used and to what extent. It might seem obvious to you, and it probably actually is obvious that this is human-written to people with tons of experience with both poetry and LLMs, but LLM capabilities are always changing, and modern readers might need to feel reassured, especially for people new to poetry. Skill building for Cyborg poetry might be high EV too, and it might be important to be an early adopter so that EA will be the first to ride the wave when things get serious).
Thanks so much! I will consider a new career path in x-risk poetry :)
Good point. I didn’t use LLMs to write this, in fact I was camping with no internet.
I agree that LLMs are getting very good at this. I might feel sad to see them produce a better poem on Chapter 4, but this seems to be the direction we are headed. I will have a discussion with the AIs and see if we can write a better poem together.
I have spoken to Claude, and I gave them the relevant sections (Nuclear Weapons and Climate Change) of this summary of the Precipice. Claude has produced the following poem:
Three a.m. sirens blare, missiles incoming,
Mere minutes until worlds end for millions.
False alarm — but thirty-two close calls in counting,
Our luck nearly expired so many times then.
Carbon dioxide blankets the earth
Once crucial for life, now disruptive change.
Four hundred twelve parts per million and rising
Warming accelerates, fuels feedback loops strange.
Uncertainty prevails despite best detections
Nine degrees? Twelve? Impacts we can’t predict.
Coastlines submerged, searing summers stretching
Mass extinctions that experts can’t contradict.
And while we’ll likely limp on short of annihilation,
What shared trials await this civilization?
Cautionary tales demand consideration —
Action must match the stakes of our situation.
I don’t quite understand the spacing, but I am impressed with Claude, as usual.