Introduction
The world would be a different place if certain forces were not to be. Just as many dead people would have been alive if they had taken different decisions that caused their dead.
Fate they say has a way of getting to us no matter what, but fate is nothing outside of the very activities we used our own hands to do or not to do. If certain things wouldn't have happened if we had taken different pathways to where we are today, then surely certain outcomes would not have been either.
Toby Ord's The Precipice offers a sober, meticulously argued case that humanity stands at a uniquely dangerous juncture in its history — a century in which the tools of our own making (nuclear weapons, engineered pathogens, unaligned artificial intelligence) could end the human story altogether. Ord's response is a call to statesmanship: better institutions, better coordination, wiser governance of dangerous technologies. What this critique argues, however, is that Ord treats the risks as the object of analysis while leaving the architecture that produces them largely unexamined. That architecture — the competitive, hierarchical, zero-sum-coded design of the institutions that govern war, science, and technology — is not gender-neutral. It is androcentric: built by men, for a world organized around masculine-coded norms of dominance, competition, and control.
This essay stages a critique of The Precipice on those grounds, arguing that Ord's existential risk catalogue is less a list of external threats to humanity than a mirror of the institutional value system that generated them.
Risk as a Symptom, Not a Starting PointOrd's method is actuarial: he assigns probabilities to each existential threat and ranks them by expected severity. This is intellectually rigorous, but it treats each risk — nuclear war, bioweapons, AI misalignment — as a discrete hazard to be managed, rather than as the downstream output of a shared institutional logic. Nuclear deterrence theory, biodefense funding structures, and the AI arms race between state and corporate actors all share a common design grammar: competition for supremacy, secrecy as strategy, and dominance as the measure of security. This is not incidental. It is the inheritance of institutions built almost exclusively by men, within political and scientific cultures that historically excluded women from the rooms where these systems were designed. Ord's book catalogues the symptoms of this design without interrogating the design itself.
The Security Dilemma Is a Masculine-Coded Institution, Not a Law of NatureA great deal of Ord's concern about nuclear war and great-power competition rests on the logic of the security dilemma — the idea that a state's efforts to protect itself are perceived as threats by others, triggering an arms race. Feminist international relations scholarship has long argued that this “law” of statecraft is not a neutral description of how nations must behave, but a historically specific product of institutions built around masculine ideals of strength, honor, and dominance. Had women been equally present at the founding of these institutions — treaty-making, military command structures, nuclear strategy — there is no guarantee the security dilemma would have been abandoned, but there is a reasonable case that alternative, less zero-sum frameworks for security (rooted in interdependence rather than deterrence) would have had a genuine seat at the table from the start, rather than being treated as a marginal, “soft” alternative to be layered on after the fact.
Engineered Pandemics and the Culture of Dual-Use Science Ord treats engineered pandemics as a looming technical risk requiring better biosafety governance. But the deeper question is why dual-use bioscience — research that can heal or kill depending on who wields it — continues to be funded and pursued despite its catastrophic downside. The answer lies in the competitive culture of scientific prestige and state security funding: labs and nations race to develop capability first, out of fear that a rival will do so anyway. This is the same competitive-dominance logic that structures nuclear strategy, transplanted into biology. It is not obviously a “masculine” pathology in a biological sense, but it is unmistakably a product of institutions historically designed around masculine-coded incentive structures — funding, prestige, and national security priorities — that were never significantly shaped by alternative values because the people best positioned to introduce them were structurally excluded.
What Ord Leaves Out: Slow Violence and the Boundary of “Existential”Ord defines existential risk narrowly: threats to civilization's survival or its long-term potential. This definition, while analytically useful, quietly excludes the slow, structural harms that do not threaten extinction but do foreclose flourishing for enormous portions of humanity — gender-based violence, maternal mortality, the collapse of unpaid care economies during crises. A holistic critique argues that this boundary is itself a value choice, and a telling one: it privileges civilization-level catastrophe (the kind of large, dramatic, state-level threat historically the domain of male-led institutions) over the slower, distributed harms that disproportionately fall on women, especially in the Global South. In other words, Ord's very definition of what counts as “existential” reproduces an androcentric hierarchy of which harms deserve our moral urgency.
Toward a Structural, Not Essentialist, CritiqueIt would be a mistake, and an intellectually weaker one, to argue that women are inherently or biologically less prone to producing existential risk. History offers enough counterexamples — women in power who pursued war, authoritarian control, or high-risk security policy — to undermine any claim that gender alone determines outcomes. The stronger and more defensible critique is structural: institutions designed under conditions of gender exclusion encode competitive, hierarchical, secrecy-oriented defaults, and those defaults are what generate the risks Ord catalogues. The claim is not “women would have saved us” — it is that a governance architecture built with genuinely equal participation from inception would likely have encoded different defaults: transparency over secrecy, interdependence over deterrence, distributed care infrastructure over centralized command. Gender-diverse leadership within the same androcentric institutions is unlikely to change much; redesigning the institutions themselves might.
Conclusion
The Precipice succeeds as a rigorous inventory of the ways humanity could destroy itself. It is largely silent, however, on the institutional grammar that produced that inventory in the first place — a grammar built under conditions of near-total gender exclusion from the founding moments of modern statecraft, science, and security policy. A holistic reckoning with existential risk cannot stop at better risk management within existing institutions; it must ask who built those institutions, under what exclusions, and what they might look like designed differently. Ord asks how humanity can survive the next century. This critique adds a prior question he does not ask: survive as what kind of civilization, built on whose values, and shaped by whom?
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