Sally Kohn: I've been haunted by Nick Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis ever since I first read about it. She says we need to be thinking about well in advance before these technologies are already widely deployed, because COVID-19 could be a hundred times worse again. The risks that arise when we get to a level of AI systems that are as good as human beings, or better, at basically all human tasks is really scary she adds.
If the human race lasts as long as a typical mammalian species and our population continues at its current size, then there are 80 trillion people yet to come. Oxford philosophy professor William MacAskill says it's up to us to protect them.
In his bold new book, "What We Owe the Future," MacAskill makes a case for longtermism. He believes that how long we survive as a species may depend on the actions we take now.
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