Why Does a Ten Percent Chance of Catastrophe Make Kevin an Optimist in San Francisco?

Kevin usually puts the probability that it all goes super bad at about ten percent. In most of the world that sounds crazy. In the city he is describing, the same ten percent makes him an optimist, because he knows people at fifty, sixty, and seventy percent, and someone at ninety-nine point nine percent. He says people still have agency, are not in the recursive self-improvement loop yet, and still could slow things down, pass some regulations, and coordinate to pace the frontier.