Is It Temporary?

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We've come across new technologies in the last hundred years that we didn't have before. But even on earth, the human race could survive for hundreds of millions of years. And so what this means is that we're living through a period of unusually fast technological progress. Will we ever get to a state where we can just reduce existential risk to zero? Basically, I don't know. If we can't, then we've got no future. We're kind of doomed anyway. but maybe we can. Maybe we can get to a position of what my colleague Toby Ord calls existential security, where we've actually just like matured as a species and figured stuff out. Then we can continue with

It’s always a little humbling to think about what affects your words and actions might have on other people, not only right now but potentially well into the future. Now take that humble feeling and promote it to all of humanity, and arbitrarily far in time. How do our actions as a society affect all the potential generations to come? William MacAskill is best known as a founder of the Effective Altruism movement, and is now the author of What We Owe the Future. In this new book he makes the case for longtermism: the idea that we should put substantial effort into positively influencing the long-term future. We talk about the pros and cons of that view, including the underlying philosophical presuppositions.

Mindscape listeners can get 50% off What We Owe the Future, thanks to a partnership between the Forethought Foundation and Bookshop.org. Just click here and use code MINDSCAPE50 at checkout.

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William (Will) MacAskill received his D.Phil. in philosophy from the University of Oxford. He is currently an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford, as well as a research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, director of the Forefront Foundation for Global Priorities Research, President of the Centre for Effective Altruism, and co-founder of 80,000 hours and Giving What We Can.

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