Losing our potential means getting locked into a bad set of futures. We can categorize existential catastrophes by looking at which aspects of our future get locked in. This could be a world without humans (extinction) or a world without civilization (unrecoverable collapse). But it could also take the form of an unrecoverable dystopia—a world with civilization intact, but locked into a terrible form, with little or no value.

Toby Ord, The precipice: existential risk and the future of humanity, London, 2020, p. 163