MacAskill’s methodology is sloppy and not suitable for x-risk

MacAskill’s analysis is also riddled with problems. Like Ord, he suffers from definitional problems. He defines ‘civilisational collapse’ as society losing the ability to create most industrial and post-industrial technologies.62 This has little relation to more common definitions of societal collapse. It also assumes that we know the full range of potential industrial and post-industrial technologies. Worse still, like with Ord’s analysis, it replaces the question of whether climate change will cause civilisational collapse with an easier one: will climate change make large-scale agriculture on Earth impossible? MacAskill concludes no. Once again, this is a different question. In short, the coverage of climate change by the most prominent existential risk scholars has been simplistic and disappointing.