4min chapter

Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours cover image

Two: Dr Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it

Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours

CHAPTER

Are There Any Practical Ways to Preserve Humanity?

I'm such that avoiding it is a opportunity, that you only get this once a to create a huge amount of benefit. And so i in order to have this accidental hope sin areas, it wouldn't be enough that there was some really clever thing we could do... It would have to be the casetat. If we didn't do it now, then there was no other opportunity to get it in order to really be the reverse. So very little thought has gone into this. But maybe if if people thought about it for, you know, more than an hour, perhaps, perhaps more than a year, they'll find something there and might be ougt to make some progress

00:00
Speaker 2
Supposetat then, sir, is also the somewhat broad approach of just promoting kind of views that you're promoting. Now, some one 200 years ago could have said, it's very important that wev preserved the long term. We should think more about how we can do this and make sure that future generations are concerned about this.
Speaker 1
Yes, that's exactly right. And and that that is also, you know, fairly natural. In in in ah, things that people did work on, there were various moral philosophers who tried to, a, to work out what were the most important issues facing, facing humans who were thinking about them, and and then promulgating these ideas to shape you know, how future generations would make ethical decisions. That was, that was something that was done by various people. And i that therefore, if they'd realized that a preserving human civilization was one of these things, then they could have, you know, tryed to incorporate that and and it probably would have worked. It would have helped, mean that common sense morality was already kind of much more focused on this than it is. And maybe, as you mentioned, m maybe the approach of the australian aboriginal people was, i was in that vein in terms of really thinking about the long term, we've
Speaker 2
talked a lot about reducing risks to fuature. What about thinking about the opposite of that, which is extremely large upsides? Are there any practical ways that people might go about, not so much preventing a really extinction or something horrible, but also trying to create something that's much more positive than what we have reason to hope for?
Speaker 1
I'm not sure, in some sum level, we had something like happen in terms of, if wetraced the expected value of the future a in the past, that once we found out how long the world had been around and how long it was expected to be around for in the future, the scope of humanity might have increased by a huge amount. And similarly, when people discovered that these tiny, little dots that moved round in the sky are the planets, were other worlds, like other earths, i the the scope might have increased quite a lot. And particularly when they found out that these, ah, these myriad points of light are the stars, where other suns, which might contain their own planets, a, you know, the scope at that point increased, you know, by the factor of a hundred billion with that discovery. So there are at least a cases where the ex value o the future went up by a lot, but that was more just by realizing that there was much more, perhaps, that we could achieve a rather than really working out some opportunity that perhaps, you know, was only here once and that we could grab. And in order to be the key behind these ideas of existential risk, as opposed to just any old way of trying to help with the long term, i this idea of this really high leverage, because it's something that is an irrevocable loss if it happens. I'm such that avoiding it is a opportunity, that you only get this once a to create a huge amount of benefit. And so i in order to have this accidental hope sin areas, it wouldn't be enough that there was some really clever thing we could do, a, say, to rearrange our society o r or something in some way that's much better. It would have to be the casetat. If we didn't do it now, then there was no other opportunity to get it in order to really be the the reverse. So i'm not sure of things like that, but very little thought has gone into this. And ah, you know, maybe if if people thought about it for, you know, more than an hour, perhaps, perhaps more than a year, they'll find something there, or at least the hints of something, and might be ougt to make some progress.

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