Original subtitles

hello and welcome to today's

intelligence squared event with will

mccaskill

will is an associate professor in

philosophy at the university of oxford

and at the time of his appointment he

was 28 years old which made him the

youngest associate professor of

philosophy in the world

he's one of the founders and leading

voices of effective altruism

effective altruism often abbreviated as

ea is both a philosophy and a social

movement that aims to use evidence and

reason to figure out how to benefit

others as much as possible and then

actually go out and do that

in that capacity he founded the

non-profits giving what we can the

center for effective altruism and 80 000

hours

together these charities moved 200

million dollars to effective charities

today

is the launch of his book here in the uk

the title of the book is what we owe the

future and the book makes the case for

long-termism we'll get into

what long-termism

means

but broadly i think it is the view that

positively influencing the long-run

future is a key moral priority of our

time

what will this conversation be about if

you're interested in will's work if

you're interested in philosophy if

you're interested in

intellectual conversations of the

times then you will

have come across his um work a lot

recently he wrote for the new york times

he published an article in the atlantic

another article in the foreign affairs

his work was covered in the guardian now

there was a long portrait in the new

yorker it even made it to the cover of

time magazine so he did a

long range of media appearances and

interviews

and one thing that we can do today is

actually to reflect a bit on how this

campaign went so far how

the communication of long-termism and

the

launch of his book went

another aspect that i would like to get

into is

why he's optimistic about the future

you will see that many of the themes

that we're discussing are quite

frightening

but he emphasizes that the book is an

optimistic one and i'm always interested

in finding good reasons to be optimistic

and lastly i want to stay true to the

topic set by intelligence square what

can we actually do to improve the world

to the generation for the generations to

come

as always you are able to

answer ask the questions that that you

might have

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iq2

hi will

great to speak with you today

uh yeah it's great to be on here

intelligent squad thank you for hosting

this and uh yeah it's great to be having

this conversation max

um i was saying your new book is about

long-termism and try to give a brief

explanation of what it is what in your

own words is long-termism

yeah so long-termism is the view that we

should be

doing much more to protect the interests

of future generations than we're

currently doing today

um

that's the key idea

um

how long term are you thinking in

when you're thinking about long-termism

uh yeah so i mean in principle

indefinitely long

the core ideas behind long term is um

that future people matter that there

could be a lot of them and that we can

make a difference to

how well their lives go and invincible

at least i think it if you're affecting

the life of someone it doesn't matter

whether they will live you know in a

hundred years time or a thousand years

time or a hundred million years time i

think their interests count kind of just

the same

and i actually think and it's very

surprising um took me a while to come

around to this view that there are

things that

uh we are doing kind of and all that

will happen in our lifetimes

that

could make a difference to

not just you know the next few

generations actually potentially all

generations to come and i think in

expectation humanity's life expectancy

could be very long in which case we're

talking about potentially hundreds of

millions or even billions of years

i mean maybe one one way to understand

this idea better is to

uh see the differences with with more

widely known ethical ideas one idea that

is now very widely accepted and

that many people have a relationship to

is the idea of sustainability

where the classic definition is to meet

the needs of the present without

compromising the ability of future

generations to meet their needs

how is long-termism different from

sustainability as an ethical idea

yeah so if that's the definition of

sustainability we use

this

namely that both uh paying much more

attention to the needs you know to

future generations

um however

uh i would want to say that

look we should speak there's nothing

special about future generations

modeling speaking

of well

helping you know not compromising on the

needs of the present while ensuring that

future generations are kind of at least

as well off

well it suggests that's like a different

way of thinking morally than

the than when comparing the interests of

people in germany versus the uk versus

uganda

and i would want to say that well just

whatever kind of moral reasoning we use

when thinking about

the impact you could have on the life of

someone in

the united kingdom versus

a poor country the rest of the united

states we should apply that same sort of

reasoning to people in the future as

well because

you know people that have interests and

hopes and joys and fears like the rest

of us

is there maybe like a practical example

for where that difference actually

matters like something that you would do

as a long-termist that you wouldn't do

as someone who's

concerned about sustainability

i mean one obvious thought is

the issue of

extinction risk where

there are some risks that

will not only be enormously harmful um

in for the pleasant generation such as

kind of worst case pandemics but would

also kind of

derail

the whole of humanity's future by just

bringing human civilization to an end

and if we're thinking in terms of like

well ensure that the needs of future

generations are met well if there are no

future generations at all

uh because we've gone extinct then it's

like it's hard to see how that principle

would apply

whereas um one of the things i think

that we really should care about is just

the loss of

the you know the enormous potential loss

in terms

accomplishment that um

would occur if

you know the human race were to

completely end and so that would be a

kind of concrete difference

right i mean that's that's maybe a

second um ethical idea that i wanted to

to understand the the difference with

long-termism a bit better

like obviously there are or maybe not

obviously but i think many people are

concerned about large-scale catastrophes

that are possibly so large that they

could possibly kill everyone

in the world

from nuclear war or

a really worst case pandemic

and

even i like as a

relatively optimistic person i i'm very

worried about these risks and and take

them seriously as as possibilities that

i want to avoid in in my own lifetime

and

even just as a self-interest per

self-interested person who's not

like taking into account what what might

happen to others

uh necessarily when i'm thinking about

this i'm concerned about existential

risks

and if i'm already there

just

being worried about my own future and

the future maybe of my children and and

those close to me

why would i um what what difference

would it make

to take a long-term ethical perspective

like what extra extra worries do i have

as a term is that i don't have any ways

as someone who's concerned about

existential risks

sure

so so

one is just even if

there was no differences in kind of how

you act uh if you're already concerned

um i do kind of think it's good for

people to have kind of what i would

regard as can affect model understanding

of the world because

i don't know perhaps we do really well

at reducing these existential risks but

perhaps there's more that we can be

doing to benefit future generations

um a second is that

i think that positively impacting the

long-term future isn't just around

about you know reducing these kind of

worst case catastrophes

uh as i talk about in the book some

length i also think it's about trying to

improve the values that might guide

future generations to

where

it seems to me at least plausible that

the values that are predominant over you

know the coming few centuries actually

could have extraordinarily long-lasting

influence

and that it's a relatively contingent

matter whether those values are good or

whether they're bad so i think it was

contingent you know historically

contingent that after the second world

war it was kind of liberal democratic

values that were predominantly stalinist

or nazi values and

i actually think the very long term

future would have looked

um

would have looked worse if it had been

kind of fascist values that had um come

out with the dominant

right

although of course

those people at that time they were not

necessarily worrying about us in 2022

they were just worried about what what

might happen next year tomorrow

uh in germany in russia in the us

um

like sure so

yeah

yeah so i think it changes how you

prioritize too

yeah where um i think all of these

things i'm pointing to they are just

really bad and

then i kind of

you know in a slogans like think long

term or act now or like

near-term risks with long-term

consequences

um so they all do have um

our possession concerns now and i think

if

the human race as a whole or society as

a whole had its act together we would be

spending vastly more to the

next

ai to be working on better values

but

um there's a question like well what's

very most important

you know if you're someone who's

altruistically mind

altruistically minded and really

motivated

um

what should we be doing to do as much

good as possible

and

the claim that society as a whole should

be trying to

do

more

um well there's still this question of

like okay as an individual

focusing on things that have

uh really large kind of short-run

impacts but where it's not really clear

how that translates into longer term

impacts so with effective algorithms one

of the things we've done is kind of

corporate cage fee campaigns

to give animals and faculty farms just

better

um better living conditions and that's

averted a huge amount of suffering i

think but it's not really clear like

what are the long lasting impacts of

that right um

and so that's a way in which i would

think okay no there are some things that

are good not just an investment but

over the long term too and they become

comparatively more important

if we've got to make these hard

tradeoffs then we start to focus on them

more

to stay on this question of values and

the political regimes that we we try to

support and uh strive for like if

if you hadn't published this book today

but you had lived um a hundred years

earlier and it was uh the first of

september 1922

um and people would have been convinced

about uh

the importance of long-termism

what would they have done differently

back then that could have made us know

better off

uh yeah i mean i think the values is the

key thing so

i mean

in if it's in the 20 the 1920s um

there are

well actually there's a few kind of

trends so

one thing is just that

the basic understanding of the

greenhouse effect and warming from

carbon dioxide

1896 was the first quantitative estimate

and it was surprisingly good actually

um

at the time people didn't appreciate

just how much carbon we were going to

emit into the atmosphere but i actually

think that with like further work

work that should have been predictable

because it's just based on an

exponentially going

what we started doing is like imagine if

we got started with the kind of campaign

to be concerned about climate change um

you know 60 years earlier or 50 years

earlier than we've done

you could have engaged in like very

gentle

long-term planning that like people

wouldn't have um

opposed perhaps it's a carbon tax that's

like one penny a per ton to begin with

and then it virtually scales up over

time you could have normalized these

ideas it could have been like

uh pretty painless i think we could have

just like

essentially avoided the problem of

climate change we would have been acting

on more speculative evidence um

but

i think the gains from acting early

would have outweighed the

you know

the losses from having to act for more

speculative evidence and so i actually

kind of see a lot of the

issues i'm pointing to such as around

engineered pathogens and artificial

intelligence as kind of like that

you know climate change in the 1920s or

something

so that's one thing

um then secondly is uh priorities that i

still think are important which are um

uh ensuring good values thinking about

future technological developments

um thinking about uh

like how bad the risk of war could be

um now

it's true that as things went like

obviously it was already enormous

attention on

you know trying to stop the lies of um

fascist germany and so in that case it's

not so clear

you know maybe there would have been

extra effort on that or something

uh but already was a lot um but still i

think that would have been helpful still

i also think that like more people

thinking about that at the time

um potentially even having a longer

thought on um

the potential for atomic weapons to just

radically change society um

uh

you know again just more people kind of

working on these issues and taking them

seriously it seems

would have resulted in a better outcome

i think

yeah like the the example of climate

change is an interesting one

now like we are bringing us back to

today um what do you think we can

actually do now to positively impact the

long-term future

uh yeah i think there's many things to

do um

the things that are most affectable and

i'm most excited about yet most

neglected are within the area of

pandemic preparedness where

um

you know this was actually one of the

things that really made me

uh

endorse the kind of long-termist

approach like really on a gut level is

just seeing that

people who are brought into these ideas

were worrying about you know

global pandemics um for many many years

encouraging people to go into these

areas and um funding them since about

2016. there was a kind of community

prediction

um that there would be a pandemic

with at least 10 million dead

and this was in 2016 in the following

decades but like one in three

probability on this

and then it's just well it happened and

was enormously costly and um you know

this enormous tragedy and it just made

me think like look we just could have

been preparing way more for

you know

allegedly unprecedented events but are

actually like foreseeable

um

and i think we can do this again and now

here's the second part of it after covet

what response has there been well after

9 11 there was you know it's trillion

dollars of foreign interference there

was um

you know a new department of homeland

security in the u.s and just enormous

kind of global response and after covert

19 has been essentially crickets but

there are things that we can really do

so early detection so you just all

around the world have sites that are

monitoring waste water screening that

waste water for all sorts of um

all dna in the sample apart from human

dna

is there any new

pathogen that's like exponentially

increasing then we can respond to

pandemic like as soon as it arises

and then a second technology i'm

particularly excited about is um low

wavelength light that

um

you can install in light bulbs and it

kind of sterilizes the room essentially

so in just the same way that you know

when i drink tap water that has been

chlorinated to cure it from

to stop it from

uh

giving me diseases but yet the air i

believe is entirely like unpurified

whereas

with research and development we could

both ensure efficacy safety and also get

the cost down we could try to have um

this sort of lighting and sold in light

bulbs all around the world as part of

building codes we could prevent the next

pandemic while also getting rid of most

of the spiritual diseases

and that's just something that's like

look it's on the table for us

we actually have a really pretty good

understanding of like how viruses work

and what we could be doing to protect

against them

it's so much on the table and i think

that's one of the things that that made

me quite a bit more pessimistic really

in uh the last years like i

i think

i would have expected that at some point

we might we might have a pandemic

i think like the the public health

experts the epidemiologists they were

very clear that the risk is is

considerable

so that wasn't that surprising but the

fact that we lived through an entire

pandemic 23 million people i think um

dead that's kind of kind of the current

access mortality estimate

like obviously everyone spent

all of these months

indoors all the lockdowns that that that

we suffered through

and that we are now uh slowly getting to

the other side of that

and we are

doing almost nothing to prevent the next

pandemic that i would have really not

predicted uh two years ago yeah

yeah me neither i was i would have

expected a much larger response

um from the governments of the world

um and so in the united states there was

um a bill called the apollo program

oh part of buildback better um was

funding the apollo block then 70 billion

dollars would have been made enormous

difference to the chance of the next

pandemic um

and yep just got completely stuck down

because there was no one really

championing it um in congress

um i know less about the uk but it's

also that i'm not

you know there's nothing i'm kind of

aware of yet in terms of like really

major programs because also globally i

mean just

economics just again pure self-interest

this like you mentioned to begin with

um

even just from the perspective of

you know people in europe and people in

the united states even if they only they

don't care about even their children

they just care about themselves

um they don't care about people you know

the global poor who will be most

affected by a pandemic

um

even just on those clowns it makes

enormous sense to be investing what is

globally tiny amounts of money and it's

yeah it's still not happening and so i

think we just yeah really need to

campaign for that

yeah we need to complain for it but i

mean these days the effective altruism

community increased so much in in size

so many smart young people that are part

of that community

that you helped to start

funding has increased a lot

um i think the effective altruism

community was good in pointing towards

the risks of future epidemics way before

the pandemic

but what would you think were the big

successes of the effective altruism

community during the pandemic

so during the pandemic um

i do think it's like

there's definitely a lesson for humility

there where i think yeah the ea

community did much better at forecasting

what was going to happen rather than

compared to

like actions that really made a big

difference so

um

there was a significant amount of um

you know advice to governments about

kind of uh

locking down earlier rather than later

um as a result of um

uh

you know actually understanding how bad

this was gonna get

um

and i think plausibly that led to

um you know many thousands or maybe tens

of thousands

um

of lives saved

uh

there was some other things i mean you

had this like

in my view you had one of the best

coping responses completely pivoting

your entire organization in order to

provide the world's best data so that

governments could make more informed

decisions

um

there was also a project that was just

giving individuals advice called

myclickover.org that did very well just

so people can know like what's the size

of risks from the different daily

activities

um

there was a project that got set up

called one day sooner that was um trying

to get a kind of human challenge style

um set up where

you know 60 000 people volunteered and

said look i'm like young and like

relatively healthy covered will pose a

small risk to me

i volunteer to

um have a 50 50 chance of being infected

so i will get a vaccine 50 50 chance of

being infected

um that would have enabled us if those

had been able to go ahead

that would have enabled us um

to have rolled out the vaccine kind of

months in advance and that would have

been hundreds of thousands of lives

saved

however the main thing i think is just

man i really wish we'd done more like i

wish we'd done so much more earlier so

that perhaps if we'd been pushing for

human challenge trials like years before

we actually could have had the

regulation in place such that you could

quickly do that in an emergency

situation rather than what

ultimately happened was that it took so

long to convince policymakers that by

the time the first

randomized controlled the first human

challenge style occurred

um we already i think had um

uh approved the kind of vaccines um and

it had been you know safety had been

demonstrated by observational studies

and and

i mean yes i agree with you i think

there

were more opportunities to actually be

helpful during the pandemic and um it's

a lesson in humility and it connects to

a bit of a larger point i think

the effect of altruism um

10 years ago when when you and others

initiated this movement was very much at

home in the global health global

development space and there you have the

big opportunity or the big advantage

that you can learn very quickly you can

trial interventions

um from vaccines to medical treatments

to cash transfers

and you can see what works and what

doesn't and then you can focus on those

things that work and scale them up

now if we

hope to impact the far future

these trials will be very long

and it's much harder to actually

to actually learn what works and what

doesn't

and then given

that one of the key concerns for the

future is the pandemic and

maybe

the effective altruism community didn't

do as well as as

we would have wished

how worried are you about this lack of

feedback and maybe

this quite poor feedback

um from this from this

closest case to to an actual

big

future risk that we now just suffered

through

yeah so i think a couple of things

so i think

one is that

one is that as soon as you start to

accept the kind of just the model in my

view moral fact that like future people

really matter and this like this huge

future ahead of us

then um

then we have like failure of like true

feedback from anything we do so it can

be like helping people in the short term

and like okay we can be sure we're

helping people in the short term

but how does that com how does that

impact the very long term

um

it would be kind of negligent to just

like ignore that altogether but then

we've got to say like actually for most

of the impact we're having because i

think most of the impact of anything we

do in the short term or most things we

do in the short term are over the long

term

it means we're having to just

you know make our best guesses or say we

don't know

a second though is just um

again this kind of distinction of like

thinking long term and acting near term

where

there are things we can do that do have

feedback loops so again we have a pretty

good understanding of

you know the mechanisms of viral

transmission so we can build a early

monitoring wastewater system

um we can see like does that work is

that effective at doing this kind of

more narrow target this like shorter

term target of just is it picking up

pathogens is it detecting new pathogens

similarly we can like um

see whether low end wavelength lighting

is working because

the number of people having colds would

use like an awful lot so you can have

like feedback in the short term and then

like what's the link between that and

the long term

well

there

um

you know there you do have to rely more

on arguments considerations the kind of

easiest case i think of something in the

short term having very long term impacts

is human extinction where you know if or

other species extinction too but

focusing on human beings like it just is

the case that like if human beings go

extinct we're never coming back from

that

and so

we just know that that's something that

would have like this extremely long-term

impact it would impact like however long

humanity's life expectancy would

otherwise be

but then the final thing i'll say as

well is just um

the main criticism that

uh effective altruism when focused on

kind of global health and development

had was

look you're just focused on what you can

measure

and um you know there's this story it

actually comes from

a 15th century turkish

um sativist called

uh

the dean i think um

which is about okay there's this drunk

and they're looking for their keys

and they're looking for the keys kind of

under the light of a street lamp and

someone comes up and says look

uh why are you like are your keys like

under the light lamp post why are you

looking there and they say oh no that's

not where my keys are but that's where

the light is

and people would you know use that

analogy and argue against and say look

you should not be focusing on the things

that easy to measure the most important

things can be much harder to measure you

just got to make your best judgments and

so you can see this as a kind of

response to that

um where uh

where we're saying look yeah we're

trying to focus on the very most

important things sometimes it's just

really hard to know if you're making any

progress in the case of like reducing

the risk of a third world war nuclear

war i think it's just it is just very

hard to know if you're making progress

does that mean we shouldn't decide i

think probably not

but it is certainly like if there's one

can expect them within effects of

altruism it's probably on this dimension

there are some people who are like look

if we don't have good feedback loops i'm

very pessimistic that we can make any

progress and those people you know still

focus on global

you know the sorts of bed nets deworming

things that like making measurable

impacts in the short term and that's

still scaling enormously like

um getting closing in on a billion

dollars per year

um

and then there's the people who say look

i'm willing to like accept maybe i'm not

going to have as reliable feedback loops

but then i'm focusing on what i think is

is really the most important thing

right

right there are these two extremes uh

where do you fall yourself in this on

this question

um what is the right mix

for for the ea community more broadly or

for anyone who wants to do good

um should they

put all of their effort into

global development or all of the effort

into long-termism

so i mean i think any individual person

will need to you'll need to make a bet

unfortunately because someone who's

working half time on

malaria and half time on

um

nuclear ward or something is probably

not going to be as effective as you know

if you've got two people one one

specializes in each

um

i'm really in favor of like an effective

autism community that has a diversity of

different world views and a diversity of

different areas that it's focusing on

um and that's for a few reasons

but one of which is just that i expect

us to learn a lot more again over the

next kind of coming decades and i think

like

uh a community that has a diverse array

of focuses um

is just going to be one that's much more

adaptable over time

um but then for me me personally um i'm

like more in the

focus on what's most important direction

um

although i definitely feel the worry

about kind of

um

i feel the worry about the lack of

feedback effects and so on and within

you know that does mean that i think for

example pandemic preparedness where i

think we can be a lot more

we can be really very confident we're

making progress on this at least often

um compared to some other issues

you know like reducing risk of nuclear

war it does make me a lot more excited

about it it makes me see that as the

kind of lowest hanging flu within

um long-term missed work

right like

and how do you think about this going

forward is there some is there some

moment is there some uh

signal some heuristic that you're

looking out for where you would think

okay we're actually on the wrong on the

wrong track with uh focusing on

long-termism is there is there actually

like

we we actually don't succeed in in

really reducing the

the risks we're not really succeeding in

uh improving the values that future

generations might uh inherit from us

is there some is there some moment that

you would wait for where you would say

i would want to achieve

uh that that this by by that point in

time and if we don't succeed then um i

really have to revise my my thinking on

long-termism

sure yeah so i mean i think there's two

ways i could advise my thinking one is

certainly just

more kind of

philosophical or theoretical arguments

just about value of the future versus

neo-term and um

uh you know some of the arguments i give

in the book and what we are the future

could certainly um

i could certainly be convinced out of

that

um

and then a second

yeah i think

i mean one area that's of particular

interest is the field of

ai alignment

um so the risk is that we might build

um increasingly powerful ai systems but

just not have a very good understanding

of like

uh

what they're going to do and especially

as their systems get more and more

powerful start to act more like actors

in the world rather than just tools it

becomes increasingly important for us to

be able to

actually predict how they will act in

the world

um this is an area where in one

important sense you do get feedback

systems so the field of ai alignment is

thinking okay how can we build ai models

that are

helpful harmless um

uh and honest um

and so

i can have like a language model

something that like produces text can

engage in like basic uh conversation

and i can say okay i want to train this

such that it never lies

so it never tells me something

false well something that

false that uh

it i can have evidence like knows the

answer to and so we can do that that's

something where we can actually like get

um

like positive feedback on

uh if it was the case that in kind of

ten years time and this is field is like

really in its infancy

um

and it's still up for debate i think

kind of how much progress on the object

level has been made there's been a lot

of like clarifying like understanding of

the um issues

uh

but in terms of like oh yeah this paper

has made this like really important

advance on the alignment problem um

uh i don't think we're quite there yet

and so if in the if it was ten years

time and that's still true

um

that would be a pretty um

yeah i think like that would be a pretty

harsh blow to that as a field at least

and so then you would need to

pandemics and just kind of there's just

so many things we can do to the juice

for risk that um

i guess

i don't know it could again be work we

do all these things and they just keep

failing and they keep failing um or

maybe we just keep learning that there's

like surprising kind of

uh backfiring effects or something

um for pandemics i think that's kind of

less likely

um but it could be the case that

if in all of the cause areas that we

think are kind of most important by

long-term slights

um

they

we just keep finding like 10 years time

we've made almost no progress on it then

yeah i would

i'd really want to rethink

yeah then at that point i'd be like

really rethinking things again it might

still be all like philosophically

justified by um right

how things ultimately get like benefit

the long-term future but um

the set of priorities would be like very

different and might look a lot closer to

common-sensically kind of building and

flourishing societies

and overall i guess the idea of

long-termism really hinges on um

actually being able to do something

concretely that

impacts the long-term future positively

so if we keep on

not seeing uh successes and

uh

yeah that yeah like i agree with you

like i'm getting the questions from oh

sorry okay sure i guess i'll say one

thing as well which is that um

you know within the people

that i know and my own views i kind of

tend to be more concerned with um

uh

you know avoiding these risks of

catastrophe or focusing on like better

values rather than um

you know like technological progress or

something

um

whereas if you think okay none of these

catastrophes doesn't make any sense i

think in general kind of innovation is

something that can benefit

um over like benefits the world over

very long time frames but like centuries

or thousands of years maybe because you

move the entire kind of frontier of um

uh kind of tech progress forward and so

maybe i'll be really pushing on things

like clean technology um which i think

is just like very robustly good from a

variety of perspectives um also like

yeah potentially lots of biomedical

technology as well because you know

you've got this upfront cost of the

investment in r d and then you've got it

you've got the idea and you just got

that idea forever and then future people

can build on it as well and so i think

the kind of long-termistic perspective

even if all of these current clarity

areas don't pan out would may be fun it

was at least uh favor

uh a little bit more like focus on

promoting like

innovation in areas like biomedicine and

um clean tech than

one might otherwise think

yeah you have this very good uh passage

there in the book on

uh clean energy

calling it a win-win-win-win-win

situation

yeah though

i actually made a mistake in the book i

should have had a sixth win i only

realized after lighting it so

which one is the original one

the one that i missed out is just i

think actually clean technology is

beneficial for society's values too

because um

there's you know what's known as the

resource curse um

if right if you can run a country by

stealing natural by just just on the

basis of natural resources that provides

uh an incentive for small groups to take

power and install dictatorships and the

means by which those dictatorships can

um be sustained and so it's mostly in

the news with russia at the moment which

uh

i think one political scientist

described as um

a gas station with an army

um whereas if you're if you're a country

that has to rely on instead on kind of

just people working and producing

producing value um

then that's much more likely to favor

kind of more egalitarian democratic um

social structure

yeah that's an interesting point it uh

connects back to this earlier point

where we discussed about what uh what a

long term is could have done a century

ago

that's also a question that i keep

seeing here in the questions that are

coming in for example carly asks what

can i do as an individual to ensure a

good future for the generations to come

and another um question that's coming in

from someone who just finished your book

yesterday

is is particularly asking

what is feasible for them as mere

mortals

we have mortals so i think like many

points that you were discussing earlier

uh from far uvc light uh to sterilize

rooms these are

very far out of uh out of um yeah then

they're not people

yeah so they're not issues that most

people are thinking

about

oh wow well what can i even do about any

of this

um and i actually think the upshot from

the burke and from effective altruism

the most positive contribution

way of seeing that is just thinking

about donations so i think for

uh pretty much anyone who's you know

middle class member of which country

like the uk or the u.s

we have this organization giving what we

can encourages people to give at least

10 percent

um some people give more

that means you can target your donation

to support whoever are the very best

people

doing the very best programs working on

the very most important problems and in

a very real way you can be participating

like you are contributing

so you know you learn our world in data

it's done by donations like the people

who are donating to our world and data

are kind of causally responsible for the

information that you put on that up on

there

just as much as the people who are like

actually writing the text

and so i think that is just one way that

anyone can contribute

um

in general

um the second thing we emphasize a lot

is via career choice as well

um that's oh and i should say with

donations we now have just created kind

of a long-termism fund if you go into

giving what we can.org then that's just

it's a place you can donate and experts

will then ensure that the money goes to

where

where we think it will currently have

the kind of highest leverage

highest impact

and so then the other thing we say is

kind of career choice as well this is

obviously a bigger ask for most people

and it's an easier decision to make if

you're young

um

it's also

a little

you know very particular of advice uh

because it's people vary so much in the

skills and interests

uh

however we have this whole website

eighty thousand hours.org

and you can go on there and get like

on

how you can have a really big positive

impact

okay and that means funding or working

and thinking

prevention like ending nuclear war

reducing the risk of nuclear war safely

governing the lives of ai

right um and

and anyone who's listening please add

more questions to to the uh to the chat

and i'll get back to them

um and and ask will more of your

questions

now today is the book launch here in the

uk in the us your book launched already

and as i said at the beginning you did

many interviews in the past um weeks

uh what's your what's your take on how

this all went in the last weeks

so yeah one take is it's just all been

pretty overwhelming so you gave the list

of

media at the start of this that was uh

many times more than i was expecting to

get

um certainly in terms of how high

profile it was like if you told me

even just two months ago now i was going

to be on the cover of time i'd be like

what like i'm so upset

so one thing has certainly been

overwhelming

i'm overall just happy as well with the

commentary like when i think about a

large majority of commentary um

it's been like positive the time story

in particular i would just like

recommend to anyone i just really

thought it captured the essence of what

we're doing um with effective ultimatum

um the thing then there's also been some

helpful clinical commentary as well so

kevin stetier is a excellent philosopher

uh

the view um in the boston review um

and

uh you know i disagree with aspects of

it i think there were parts of the book

he missed but i was also just like i was

just i'm happy to see i like think these

ideas should be debated and discussed

and like

i was happy to see some like really

engaged commentary there

um the thing that i've been most

surprised by or like disappointed by is

kind of misinformation um

i mean i have a bad habit of just

checking kind of all critical twitch

twitter comments that i can i can find

um

but it's just so many kind of uh false

claims going around about what i believe

or focus on

um

the

yeah i mean there's this

huge idea there's this oh sorry there's

this idea that people are sometimes

saying like oh long term it's just an

excuse

for very rich people to keep their

wealth rather than um

and like feel good about themselves

rather than focusing on like

the most um

pressing problems

whereas it's like exactly the opposite

is the the case where via effective

altitude and then long termism we've

resulted in like

enormous

changes in

how

uh many people

and so on and instead towards firstly

just some things that are purely like

global health and development focused

now over a billion dollars have gone to

by effective autism has gone to global

health and development

really good in the short term as well as

in the long term so i've been advising

this foundation future fund

which you know scaled up from zero to

about 150 million dollars in the first

six months of its operation um and you

know the primary the largest cause area

was pandemic preparedness and prevention

right and again like if you don't think

that

future pandemics are going to be

you know likely and like enormously

harmful in the short term then um i

think completely mistaken

and so i think it's unfortunate

basically i kind of like

elon tweets about you and

there's a there's a certain

uh fraction of the world for whom it's

like you are now gone

this like

uh

yeah you're kind of never going to be

supportive of

and then something that's kind of

more recent articles there's been a very

intense focus on

uh risk of what i call kind of ai

takeover um

uh occasionally with like terminator

photos kind of thing

um

and that's like

in one sense that's

completely fair because that's like a

big aspect of

you know the broader effective altitude

community is like actually really

worrying about

um

risks from advanced artificial

intelligence um including risk of loss

of control on the other hand it's a bit

surprising for me because it's like it's

not really something i work on

uh it's only a very small part of the

book

um and so it does feel a bit like

they're honing in on that because that's

the kind of

spiciest thing rather than um

rather than the kind of what i see is

the main messages in the book

right um

one

like let me ask one for that question on

on the on how the media went

um

like why do you think

are people interested in in spreading

this misinformation about about

long-termism where does it come from and

who's motivated

um

to go in that direction like

i mean yeah i mean

the most surprising like what's your

explanation for for where this comes

from uh i mean i think there's a

couple of

years starts getting big you're gonna

have debate and criticism and

the quality of online commentary

um is often

you know the things that i'm like really

getting upset tend to be more like

twitter or other areas and you know the

bar is pretty low in terms of

uh the algorithm i think kind of

uh rewards

um yeah the ward's anchor and debate

um

there are

yeah then there are i guess

like

um

uh specific uh uh

um

you know one person who just uh is very

very active and

uh his view is just that actually

civilization is a bad thing um

it would be better if we just collapsed

and never came

uh because he just thinks well

something in the future is just

like

human humanity is just like a bad thing

overall um and that's a view i disagree

with

rhythms like very

um

keen on kind of like

yeah be uh aggressively attacking us in

smearing us in like whatever way

possible

i mean that's actually a question that

uh that i also got here from from one of

the um viewers um

he or she says they have met a person

who told them that it was the that it

would be the best thing for the planet

if humans would go extinct

what do you say to someone who believes

this

uh yeah so the thing i'd say is i have a

whole chapter on this and what we are

the future um

uh chapter nine in fact um

and

so

in the chapter i talk about a few things

one is just

okay let's just take the world today or

like the world of 2022 is that world

good or bad like better than nothing

like if i could click my fingers and

have blankness an empty universe love in

that world would that be better

um

and

well let's just start off with human

beings like

the humans overall have lives that

um

uh have kind of positive

um i go through like a variety of

different sorts of psychological

research including some of the search

that um i had to just commission myself

because there was very little um in the

way of work that was actually done on

this um but basically but if you ask

people um in both the us and india uh

do you think

are you glad to have been born or do you

kind of forget being born and you can

ask that in a few different ways do you

think your life has more happiness than

suffering

then um well over 70 percent of people

say yes that they are glad to have been

born they think their life has had more

happiness than suffering there is a

small faction um on the order of about

10 who say no as well and so that's

important too um i think actually even

just within healthcare

i think a lot would change about how we

think about

things

seriously the fact that um some people

think their lives have been have been

worse than zealand

uh then i think there's like obviously

lots of other conservations i think the

amount of suffering we inflict on the

animals and factory farms

um

uh i do think that the trend in human

well-being um has

been possible on average and much better

off today than they were a few hundred

years ago

um where life a few hundred years ago

was really very bad

um

uh you know surgically without an

aesthetic um 14 hour days um doing

grueling like farming labor uh most

people were in some form forced labor as

well

um

the past is a pretty dark place

and then um when i look to the future um

i do think there's an asymmetry that

like points in the direction of

um

that gives us kind of

i think just um

most beings will be actors rather than

patients um where like an animal in a

factory farm is a patient doesn't have

control over its own life i don't expect

factory farming to persist like far into

the future

um

uh and then secondly people who are

actors like

in the sense like they can choose how

their life goes

combined with the much greater kind of

scientific knowledge and technological

ability we'll have in the future

suggests well at least those people will

be trying to make their lives better and

they'll you know

we'll have kind of coordination that

will allow that to happen

and so that overall makes me think

uh you know

the world today is probably better than

enough

three blank universe um and i think it's

on average like i think the major risks

by which things could get worse and we

should really work to reduce those risks

to zero but it makes me think that on

average um

as science and technological advancement

continues it'll um get better and worse

right

one one last question on the reception

from karim who's asking in which

countries have your ideas been best

received

oh wow that's a great um

question uh

so doing good better sold weirdly well

in south korea it's like more sold more

copies there than anyone else uh and i'm

still not quite sure

um why that was

uh in terms of uptake the

country that see the at least the large

country that seems to me like it's most

overrepresented with people

interested in engaged and effective

and uh

i'm not sure why that is

but i think it could be about kind of

no-nonsense attitudes and like culture

that australia has

um

where

[Music]

you know effects of altruism certainly

important bodies are kind of

relatively simple

um about it and

that is uh something i think that like

you know resonates particularly with

people in australia

interesting like very very different uh

countries in many ways south korea and

australia for sure yeah

when you uh hinted at some of the

reasons for optimism uh just now but

thinking about

like the overall idea that more people

are interested in actually making the

world a better place rather than uh

being uh sitting on the sidelines and

letting bad things happen

um

but overall also going back to this

earlier uh point that we discussed on

maybe the the

um disappointing

reaction to the to the pandemic what

makes you optimistic

about long-termism

for the next few years like what the

what can the um

community achieve

and what are your reasons for optimism

there uh yeah so

one reason for optimism is just the

really extraordinary growth in interest

um

in long-term effective autism where it's

really just

many many thousands of people around the

world

who are feeling inspired and saying yes

like i want to make the world better

i'm

i think there are some really pleasing

risks and i think we can we can take

action to mitigate them

and so one is just like influx of people

um and then secondly this influx of um

uh kind of philanthropic resources

behind that as well

where

this has been convincing fantastic

put their money where their mouths are

and um support um highly effective

projects um

so that's one thing and then secondly is

just um i think there are just a whole

bunch of

and like

you know close to

you know what we call shovel ready

so one organization is um alvia which

got started

so there's a lot of new kind of

start-up non-profit

organizations or socially motivated

organizations so alvia

within 60 days of being launched in

december had already designed

um

uh

vaccines specific to omicron ba2 i think

it was the

first vaccine

that form designed in the world and they

really want to they want to do just many

things one is having a platform such

that again if a new pandemic breaks out

we can have

all the infrastructure is in place

such that

you have vaccines

that are targeted to the specific

pathogen

go

in

two months

for um in the cover 19 pandemic that's

like totally possible we just need to

invest the resources into doing it

they also want to scale up these kind of

early detection systems and so again i

think that's just something that is

going to happen

again this kind of low wavelength

lighting

that's something that like we need to be

investing a lot more in um

but something again i'm kind of

cautiously optimistic about

uh

then

um another kind of area that's kind of

giving me cause for hope is the

massive uptake in the use of kind of

forecasting as well where this is a way

basically just techniques that you can

use to gather and aggregate forecast

precise forecasts for many different

people such that we can move out of the

realm of saying

um well how you know

a war with ch between the us and china

could happen could not

um

uh

we can move beyond that and instead like

get a kind of accurate wealth

then that means we can really start to

prioritize things better it means that

governments can make kind of much more

um

effective and well-informed

because i think that is like again a

kind of crucial lesson from covet 19 is

that something we need to invest in is

nimble flexible adaptable um

uh kind of governmental decision making

right

that's a good list of of reasons to to

be optimistic and maybe also

um a good

place to end this conversation uh we're

reaching the end of the hour

my thanks to to you will thanks for

joining us today thanks for

your questions from the audience

and thanks to intelligent squared