Making Sense - Sam Harris - #208

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.340 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:48.500 Okay, while the last episode was controversial, episode 207 on racism and police violence,

00:00:58.560 we have since released an annotated transcript to that episode, with links to relevant videos

00:01:06.080 and articles and data.

00:01:09.040 I've seen some response, some of it quite effusive in praise, and some of it outraged, which of

00:01:17.640 course I expected.

00:01:18.400 many people also contacted me privately to convey their gratitude and full support, all the while

00:01:25.780 making it clear that they can't take such a position publicly.

00:01:29.700 And this is definitely a sign of the times that concerns me.

00:01:33.700 I'm talking about people who, in any sane society, should be able to have the courage of their

00:01:40.240 convictions, and some people thought it ironic, even hypocritical, for me to trumpet the value

00:01:47.540 of conversation in a solo podcast.

00:01:52.260 But the truth is, that podcast was just my way of starting my side of a public conversation.

00:01:59.260 I'm sure I will have proper conversations on this topic in future episodes, and I welcome

00:02:05.220 recommendations about who I should speak with, but given what I perceive to be the desperate

00:02:11.620 state of public irrationality at the moment, I wanted to say something at full length that

00:02:18.940 was relatively well-formulated and comprehensive, rather than just lurch into a conversation with

00:02:24.720 someone and just see what came of it.

00:02:27.780 Anyway, as I make clear in the podcast, that wasn't the final word on anything, apart from my

00:02:34.400 sense that intellectual honesty has to be the basis for any progress we make here.

00:02:39.740 And to that end, I will keep listening and reading and having conversations.

00:02:46.460 Another thing to clarify here, there are now two formats to the podcast.

00:02:51.100 And actually, there's three types of podcasts that fall into two categories.

00:02:58.920 The first is the regular podcast, which is generally an exploration of a single topic, and that is

00:03:05.420 usually with a guest, very often based on a book he or she has written.

00:03:10.000 But sometimes it's a solo effort, like my last podcast was.

00:03:14.180 And the aim in this standard format is to say something of more than topical interest.

00:03:22.640 These are podcasts that I hope if you listen to them two years from now, or even further in the

00:03:28.940 future, they would still be worth listening to. And if you're seeing these episodes online,

00:03:34.440 you'll see that they have a unique photo or piece of artwork associated with them, and they're

00:03:39.180 titled in some way to reflect their theme. And the second format, which I've piloted with Paul

00:03:45.660 Bloom and Caitlin Flanagan, but which I've also used for other guests recently, David Frum, Jonathan

00:03:52.340 Haidt, Andrew Yang, Yuval Noah Harari, this format aims to be more topical. It's not that we won't say

00:04:00.740 anything of lasting interest, but the goal is certainly to cover some events that are in the news,

00:04:06.360 and to not linger too long on any one topic. And these episodes are titled just with the date

00:04:13.080 of the broadcast. So I hope that clarifies any confusion out there. Once again, if you want to

00:04:19.780 get full episodes of the podcast, you need an account at samharris.org. And as there are no sponsors

00:04:25.620 for the show, the fact that people subscribe is what allows me to do this. So thank you all for your

00:04:31.960 support. Okay, and now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Toby Ord. Toby is a philosopher at

00:04:42.540 Oxford University, working on the big picture questions that face humanity. He is focused on the

00:04:48.680 ethics of global poverty. He is one of the young founders of the effective altruism movement. I

00:04:55.680 previously had his colleague, Will McCaskill, on the podcast. And he created the online society,

00:05:02.960 Giving What We Can, which has gotten its members to pledge over 1.5 billion dollars to the most

00:05:08.680 effective charities. And his current research is on the risks that threaten human extinction or the

00:05:15.120 permanent collapse of civilization, otherwise known as existential risk. And Toby has advised the World

00:05:22.540 Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the U.S. National Intelligence

00:05:28.060 Council, and the U.K. Prime Minister's Office. And most important, Toby is the author of the new book,

00:05:36.080 The Precipice, Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. And it is an excellent book, which we cover

00:05:43.200 only in part in this conversation. But we cover a lot. We talk about the long-term future of humanity,

00:05:49.920 the moral biases that we all suffer with respect to distance in space and time, the psychology of

00:05:58.120 effective altruism, feeling good versus doing good, possible blind spots in consequentialism,

00:06:05.700 natural versus human-caused risk, the risk of asteroid impacts, nuclear war, pandemics,

00:06:12.900 the potentially cosmic significance of human survival, the difference between bad things and the absence

00:06:19.360 of good things, population ethics, population ethics, Derek Parfit. Derek Parfit was Toby's thesis advisor,

00:06:27.560 the asymmetry between happiness and suffering, climate change, and other topics.

00:06:35.060 Needless to say, this is a conversation that stands a very good chance of being relevant for many years to

00:06:40.900 come, because our capacity to destroy ourselves is only increasing.

00:06:45.500 So, without further delay, I bring you Toby Ord.

00:06:55.480 I am here with Toby Ord. Toby, thanks for joining me.

00:06:59.440 Great to be here.

00:07:01.060 So, I'm very happy we finally got together. This has been a long time coming, and I knew I wanted to

00:07:06.580 speak with you even before your book came out, but your book has provided the perfect occasion.

00:07:11.820 The book is The Precipice, Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, and it couldn't be

00:07:19.040 better timed in some way, except one of my concerns in this conversation is that people

00:07:25.100 have, without even thinking about it in these terms, something like existential risk fatigue,

00:07:31.100 given that we're dealing with this global pandemic, which is not in and of itself an existential risk,

00:07:36.640 as we'll talk about, but I've had a bunch of podcasts on topics related to this, like nuclear

00:07:43.180 war and other big-picture concerns that I felt have been sort of mistimed in the current moment.

00:07:51.980 And so, I delayed this conversation, and I feel like people have acclimated to, if not the new normal,

00:07:58.440 a long emergency of some kind.

00:08:00.380 And this now strikes me as the perfect time to be having this conversation, because,

00:08:06.340 as I'm sure we'll talk about, this really seems like a stress test and a dress rehearsal

00:08:13.560 for much bigger problems that may yet come. And so, it's really an opportunity for us to learn the

00:08:21.920 right lessons from a bad but ultimately manageable situation. And perhaps to start here,

00:08:28.620 you can just introduce yourself, and I will have introduced you properly before, but how do

00:08:34.860 you describe your work as a philosopher and what you have focused on up until this moment? And

00:08:40.300 perhaps, how do you see the current context in which to think about these ideas?

00:08:45.800 Yeah, I'm a philosopher at Oxford University, where I specialize in ethics. Although, I didn't

00:08:52.740 always do philosophy. I used to be in science, specializing in computer science and artificial

00:08:57.440 intelligence. But I was really interested in questions, big picture questions, which is not

00:09:03.860 that fashionable in ethics, but questions about really the, what are the biggest issues facing

00:09:09.760 humanity? And what should we do about them? Thinking about humanity over the really long run,

00:09:16.280 and really global issues. So, I found that within philosophy is a place where one can ask these kinds

00:09:22.300 of questions. And I did quite a bit of work on global poverty in the past, as one of the really

00:09:29.940 big pressing issues facing humanity. And then I've moved in more recently, to really be specializing

00:09:36.500 in existential risk, which is the study of risks of human extinction, or other irrevocable losses of

00:09:45.680 the future. For example, if there was some kind of collapse of civilization, that was so great,

00:09:50.780 and so deep, that we could never recover. That would be an existential catastrophe. Anything in

00:09:56.040 which the entire potential of humanity would be lost. And I'm interested in that, because I'm very

00:10:02.580 hopeful about the potential of humanity. I think we have potentially millions of generations ahead of

00:10:08.600 us, and a very bright future. But we need to make sure we make it to that point.

00:10:12.540 Hmm. Yeah. And I assume you do view the current circumstance as, in some sense, despite the obvious

00:10:21.520 pain it's causing us, and the death and suffering and economic problems that will endure for some time,

00:10:30.680 on some level, this is almost as benign a serious pandemic as we might have experienced. And in that

00:10:38.960 sense, it really does seem like an opportunity to at least get our heads around one form of

00:10:46.180 existential risk.

00:10:47.940 Yeah. I see this as a warning shot, the type of thing that has the potential to wake us up to some

00:10:54.740 even greater risks. If we look at it in the historical perspective, it was about 100 years ago,

00:11:01.180 the 1918 flu. It looks like it was substantially worse than this. That was an extremely bad global

00:11:08.480 pandemic, which killed, we don't really know how many, but probably a few percent, something like

00:11:14.500 3% of all the people in the world, which is significantly in excess of where we are at the

00:11:19.160 moment. And if we go further back, in the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed somewhere between about

00:11:25.580 a quarter and a half of all people in Europe, and significant numbers of people in Asia and the

00:11:32.100 Middle East, which may have been about a tenth of all the people in the world. So sometimes we hear

00:11:38.240 that the current situation is unprecedented, but I think it's actually the reverse. What we'd thought

00:11:44.220 was that since it was 100 years since a really major global pandemic, we'd thought that that was all in

00:11:50.040 the past and we were entering an unprecedented era of health security. But actually, it's not. We're

00:11:57.200 actually still vulnerable to these things. So I think it's really the other way around.

00:12:01.400 So before we jump into existential risk, I just want to talk about your background a little bit,

00:12:06.820 because I know from your book that Derek Parfit was your thesis advisor, and he was a philosopher who

00:12:13.600 I greatly admire and was actually, I had a, I was in the middle of an email exchange with him when he

00:12:20.340 died. I was trying to record an interview with him and really consider it a major missed opportunity

00:12:27.580 for me, because he's just, he was such a, had such a beautiful mind. And then I know some of your other

00:12:32.920 influences, Peter Singer, who's been on the podcast, and Nick Bostrom, who's been on as well, have,

00:12:38.400 you single them out as people who have influenced you in your focus, both on effective altruism and

00:12:45.640 existential risk. I guess before we jump into each specifically, they strike me as related

00:12:53.760 in ways that may not be entirely obvious. I mean, obviously they're related in the sense that in,

00:13:00.560 in both cases, we're talking about the well-being and survival of humanity. But with effective

00:13:07.900 altruism, we're talking about how best to help people who currently exist and, and to mitigate

00:13:15.460 suffering that isn't in any sense hypothetical. It's just that these are people, you know, specifically

00:13:20.800 the, you know, the poorest people on earth who we know exist and we know are, are suffering the

00:13:28.380 consequences of intolerable inequality or what should be intolerable inequality in our world. And we can do

00:13:35.640 something about it. And, and the effective piece in effective altruism is just how to target our

00:13:42.540 resources in a way that truly helps and helps as much as possible. But then with existential risk,

00:13:49.400 we're talking rather often about people who do not yet exist and may never exist if we don't get our

00:13:56.580 act together. And we're also talking about various risks of bad things happening, which is to say,

00:14:02.840 we're talking about hypothetical suffering and death for the most part. It's interesting because

00:14:08.660 these are, I mean, in some sense, very different by those measures, but they play upon the deficiencies

00:14:16.820 in our intuition, our moral intuitions in similar ways. I'm not the first person to notice that our ethics

00:14:23.760 tends to degrade as a function of physical distance and over any significant time horizon,

00:14:31.560 which is to say we, we feel less of an obligation to help people who are far away from us in space

00:14:37.380 and in time. We, the truth is we even feel less of an obligation to prepare for our own well-being

00:14:43.820 when we think about our future self. If we discount our concern about our own happiness and suffering

00:14:49.900 fairly, extremely over the time horizon. Let's talk about the basic ethics here and, and feel free to

00:14:57.920 bring in anything you want to say about Parfit or any of these other influences, but how do you think

00:15:04.020 about proximity in space and time influencing our, our moral intuition and, and, you know, whether or not

00:15:13.540 these things should have any moral significance? So in terms of physical distance, Peter Singer was a big

00:15:22.060 influence on me when it comes to that. He has this brilliant paper, Famine, Affluence and Morality,

00:15:28.280 where he asked this question about, you know, if you, if you're walking on the way to work and you

00:15:35.580 passed a child drowning in a pond, you know, and in order to go in and help them to save them, you would

00:15:42.140 have to ruin your shoes or your suit or some aspect like this, which is, you know, significant value.

00:15:47.840 Say you're going to give a fancy lecture. And most of us, you know, without really much hesitation,

00:15:54.020 would go in and do this. And in fact, we might think it's wrong for someone if they just, you know,

00:15:58.300 looked at their suit and their shoes and then kind of thought, oh, actually, no, I'm not going to do

00:16:01.700 that and walked on by. And he made this analogy to what about people in distant countries? There's

00:16:07.360 some, some question about exactly how much it costs to save a life in poor countries. And it may

00:16:13.280 actually cost more than a, more than a fairly nice suit, maybe about a thousand dollars U.S.

00:16:18.060 But he, he kind of asked this question about what's really different in those cases and could

00:16:22.980 the physical distance really matter? Could the fact that they're, they're a stranger matter? And

00:16:27.480 he came up with a whole lot of ways of thinking about these differences and showing that none of

00:16:31.020 them really could matter. So yeah, he, he's, you know, really helped challenge a lot of people,

00:16:36.880 including me about that. Now, effective altruism is more general than just thinking about global

00:16:43.760 poverty. It could apply to existential risk as well. And in fact, many effective altruists do

00:16:48.940 think in those terms, but it's about this idea of really trying in our lives to be aware of how much

00:16:55.880 good we could do with our activities, such as donations or through our careers and really trying

00:17:03.180 to think seriously about the scale of it. So I got really interested in this when I looked at,

00:17:10.540 at a, a study called disease control priorities and developing countries to a catchy name, DCP2.

00:17:17.400 And it had this table in it where they'd looked at over a hundred different ways of helping people

00:17:23.300 in poor countries with their health. And if you looked at the, the amount that you could help in

00:17:29.980 terms of health, like in terms of healthy life years for a given amount of money, say a thousand

00:17:34.560 dollars, there was this really striking difference where the, the best interventions were about 10,000

00:17:41.080 times more effective than the, the least good ones. And the, the, uh, in fact, they're about a hundred

00:17:47.640 times better than the middle intervention. It was a log normal distribution. So this was something where

00:17:54.180 I did a bit of technical work on this and found a whole lot of interesting stats like that.

00:17:58.200 It obeyed almost exactly the 80, 20 rule, where if you funded all of these, these ways of helping

00:18:03.240 people in poor countries, 80% of the impact would happen from the, the 20% most effective

00:18:08.580 interventions. And also if you had a choice between two interventions at random and, uh, on average,

00:18:15.720 the more effective one would be a hundred times as effective as the less effective one.

00:18:19.540 So this is something where it really woke me up to this fact that where you give can be actually

00:18:26.560 even more important than whether you give. So if you're giving to something that say for a certain

00:18:31.520 amount of money is enough to save a life, there may well be somewhere you could give that would

00:18:35.560 save a hundred lives. And that choice, how you make it 99 people's lives, you know, depend upon

00:18:41.940 you making that right. Whereas the difference between you giving to the middle charity or nothing

00:18:46.360 is only one person's life. So maybe it could be even more important kind of where you give

00:18:51.440 than if you give in some sense, although obviously it's, it's, they're both important.

00:18:56.480 And so it was really thinking about that, that made me realize this and, uh, within moral philosophy,

00:19:02.220 there's a view utilitarianism or consequentialism. There's a kind of family of views that take

00:19:08.520 doing good really seriously. They're not just focused on not doing things that are wrong,

00:19:13.400 but also on how much can you help? But it made me realize that the people who support other ethical

00:19:19.300 views, they should still be interested in doing much more good with the resources that they're

00:19:25.080 devoting to helping others. And so, you know, I set up an organization called giving what we can

00:19:30.420 trying to encourage people to give more effectively and to give more as well. So it was based around a

00:19:37.120 pledge to give at least 10% of your income to the most effective places that we know of initially

00:19:42.800 around global poverty and global health. Although we've broadened that out to, to include anything,

00:19:48.060 for example, it could be animal charities or any way of helping others as much as you can.

00:19:52.880 And in fact, we, we've, uh, now got more than 4,000 people have made that pledge. They've given

00:19:58.740 more than a hundred million dollars to the most effective charities they know of and have pledged

00:20:03.020 more than a billion dollars. So it's actually a pretty big thing, uh, in terms of the, the number

00:20:08.040 of people who've embraced this message and are really trying to, uh, to really make their charitable

00:20:12.700 giving count. Yeah. Well, your, your colleague, Will McCaskill, who put us together, was on the

00:20:18.260 podcast a while back and, and that conversation was very influential on my thinking here because

00:20:26.160 the one thing you both have done in your thinking about effective altruism is you have uncoupled

00:20:33.280 sentimentality from a more hard-headed concern about just what actually works and what saves the

00:20:41.540 most lives. So much of philanthropy in its messaging and its tacit assumptions and in the, the experience

00:20:48.900 of people giving or deciding whether or not to give is predicated on the importance of feeling good

00:20:56.880 about giving and finding psychological reward there. And I'm convinced that's still important.

00:21:04.120 And I think we should figure out ways to amplify that. But at the end of the day, we need to correct

00:21:11.920 for our failures to be maximally rewarded by the most important contributions we can make. This is just a

00:21:20.280 kind of a domain-wide human failing that the worst things that can happen are not the things we find

00:21:28.040 most appalling and the best things we can do are not the things we find most rewarding. And surveying

00:21:33.860 this landscape of moral error, we need to find ways to correct for the reliable failures of our

00:21:40.920 intuitions. And so in talking to Will, it occurred to me that one way to do this is just to automate it.

00:21:46.520 I mean, you just, I've now spoken about this several times on the podcast, but it's, it was such an

00:21:50.980 instructive example for me because at the time, Will was saying that the most effective or certainly

00:21:56.540 one of the most effective ways of mitigating human death was to give money to the Against Malaria

00:22:03.680 Foundation. At the time, that was number one on the, I think on the GiveWell site might still be. And

00:22:11.060 I recognize that in myself, that that was a cause which, you know, struck me as deeply unsexy,

00:22:20.020 right? It's not that it's, I don't care about it. I do care about it when you give me the details,

00:22:24.260 but, you know, buying insecticide-treated bed nets and giving them out, it's neither the problem nor

00:22:32.160 the intervention that really tugs at my heartstrings. And it's just obvious that shouldn't be the

00:22:39.500 priority if in fact this is the way to save a life at the lowest dollar cost. And so, and so,

00:22:46.960 yeah, so I just decided to automate my giving to that, that one charity, knowing that it was,

00:22:53.120 it was vulnerable to my waking up in a month, not being able to care much about malaria. And so,

00:22:59.640 I mean, that, that's the kind of thing that you and Will and your, and the movement you guys have

00:23:04.560 inspired has made really salient and actionable for people to, I mean, that alone is a huge

00:23:11.420 contribution. And, and so thank you for doing that work.

00:23:15.020 Oh, no problem. That's, that's exactly why we did it. I should say, it's also the question of

00:23:21.500 how much you give is another thing that to try to automate as you put it.

00:23:26.640 Yeah. So I used to, like when I was a grad student, I, I used to, because I was aware of

00:23:33.240 these, these numbers and like how, how much further my money could go abroad. It basically

00:23:38.300 around about, I could do around about a thousand or 10,000 times as much good with my money by giving

00:23:44.620 it to the most effective places abroad than I could by spending it on myself. I, I worked this out

00:23:50.380 and that meant that, you know, I, I became very pained, you know, when I was at the supermarket

00:23:57.100 trying to work out whether to buy the absolute cheapest cereal or the second cheapest cereal.

00:24:02.120 And that, that's not really a good pathway to go down because you're, you're not that productive

00:24:06.440 if you're spending all your time stressing about that. So I, I took an approach instead of, of working

00:24:11.580 out how much to give and committing to give a large amount of my money over the rest of my life.

00:24:16.500 And then just living within my reduced means. And then you just basically just pretend that

00:24:21.780 your salaries, you know, or, or that your salary is a bit lower, you know, maybe pretend that you

00:24:26.020 took a, uh, uh, a job in the charitable sector or something, you know, with a, with a smaller salary

00:24:30.380 in order to do more good or pretend that you're being taxed a bit more because, you know, it would

00:24:35.560 be good if some of our money was taken to, to help people who are much less fortunate than ourselves

00:24:39.720 and then, and then just live within that reduced means. Yeah. Or you, or you could pretend that you're

00:24:43.620 working one day a week or one day out of every 10 for the benefit of, of others.

00:24:51.460 Yeah. That's, that's another way to think about it. Yeah. And it turned out that I made a, I mean,

00:24:57.660 the, the pledge it's based around is to give at least 10% of your income to where it can help the

00:25:01.980 most or where you think it can help the most. And we're not too prescriptive about that, but

00:25:06.500 ultimately I've given a bit over a quarter of, uh, everything I've earned so far. But the way I,

00:25:12.320 I think about it is, uh, to think about, uh, actually what Peter Singer suggested, which is

00:25:17.680 to set a, uh, amount of spending money on yourself and then to give everything above it. And I set that

00:25:24.200 to an amount, which is about equal actually to the median income in the UK at the time. And a lot

00:25:30.060 of journalists, yeah, would say, well, how on earth could you live on less than, uh, you know,

00:25:33.580 18,000 pounds per year? And yeah, it was kind of weird. I was trying to point out that actually

00:25:39.080 half of the population of the UK do that. So, uh, people would lose a bit of touch on these things

00:25:44.100 and, uh, that makes it, you know, makes it clear that it's as doable, uh, if you think about it in

00:25:48.600 those terms. So, so, but it is useful to use techniques like these to make it easier. So you're not

00:25:54.280 using all your willpower to keep giving instead, you make a kind of lasting commitment. That's the point

00:25:58.900 of making a long-term commitment on this, uh, is to, to tie yourself to the mast and make it a bit,

00:26:04.160 you know, a bit less onerous to be reevaluating this all the time. And we found that that, that

00:26:08.640 worked quite well. Initially people said, well, no one's going to do this. No one's going to make

00:26:13.200 this commitment. Forgetting of course, that there have been traditions of giving 10% of your income

00:26:18.040 for a long time, but it's something where, you know, we found actually that, that there are a lot

00:26:23.380 of people who would, and as I said, more than a hundred million dollars have been given and more

00:26:27.920 than a billion dollars pledged because it really adds up. And it's one of these things where if

00:26:32.820 someone kind of shakes a can at you on the street corner, it's not worth spending a lot of your time

00:26:37.740 trying to work out whether to give and also whether this is a, the best cause you could be giving to

00:26:42.760 because there's such a small amount at stake. But if you're making a choice to give something like

00:26:47.680 a 10th of your income over the rest of your life, you know, that, that's, that's something like

00:26:52.040 more than a hundred thousand dollars. And, you know, it's really, really worth quite a few

00:26:57.100 evenings of reflection about where to give it and whether you're going to do it and to make such

00:27:01.460 a commitment. But if you do, you know, there's, there's a lot at stake. So we found that, that

00:27:05.660 thinking in these bigger chunks, you know, really zooming out on your charitable giving over your

00:27:10.260 whole life and setting yourself in a certain direction on that really showed and made it worthwhile to

00:27:16.000 do it right. Yeah. And one of the ways you cut through sentimentality here is around the question

00:27:22.740 of what people should be doing with their time if they want to benefit the most number of people.

00:27:29.440 And it's not that everyone should be rushing into the charity sector and working for directly for a

00:27:37.120 cause they find valuable. You argue that if you have a talent to make immense wealth some other way,

00:27:45.540 well, then that is almost certainly the better use of your time. And then you just give

00:27:50.900 more of those resources to the charities that you want to support.

00:27:55.020 Yeah. So my colleague, Will McCaskill really, I mean, we'd talked about this right from the start,

00:28:00.640 but he really took that a step further when he set up this, this organization, 80,000 hours

00:28:04.920 with Ben Todd. And they were, they were going deep on this and, and really thinking, okay, we've,

00:28:12.440 we've got a theory for what to do with your charitable giving. How can you make that more

00:28:16.180 effective and really actually help more recipients or help those recipients by a larger amount.

00:28:21.900 And 80,000 hours was about this huge amount of time over your whole career and really trying to

00:28:28.280 spend, you know, if you're going to spend 80,000 hours doing your job, it kind of makes it obvious

00:28:33.240 that it could be worth spending, you know, a hundred hours or more thinking seriously about where you're

00:28:38.860 going to devote that time. And one of the things they considered was this idea of earning to give,

00:28:44.200 of taking a deliberately high paid job so that you could donate a lot more. And in some cases,

00:28:49.360 you could do a lot of good with that, particularly if you're someone who's, who's well suited to such

00:28:53.000 a job and also kind of emotionally resilient. There are a lot of people who want to do a lot of good

00:28:59.600 in the world, but really wouldn't last if they went into finance or something. And, you know,

00:29:04.480 everyone else, all of their friends were always offered the golf course or something. And this

00:29:09.560 person was scrimping and saving and couldn't socialize with any of their colleagues and so on

00:29:13.580 and saw them live into excess. It could be pretty difficult. But if you're someone who can deal with

00:29:18.620 that or can take a pretty sensible approach, maybe give half of what you earn in finance and still live

00:29:24.780 a very good life by any normal standards. And some people have taken that up, but that wasn't the

00:29:30.360 only message. We're also really interested in, in jobs, in areas where you could do a lot of good,

00:29:35.680 for example, working on a charitable foundation in order to help direct their endowment to the most

00:29:40.860 effective things to help others. Also, we found that, that people, we were very interested in a few

00:29:46.760 different areas. There were kind of a few clusters of work, which were on global health and global

00:29:51.620 poverty. That cluster was really to do with the fact that the poorest people in the world live on

00:29:57.880 about a hundredth of the median US wage. So, and it means therefore, because there's diminishing

00:30:07.420 returns on, on our income, that our money can do roughly a hundred times more good to help those

00:30:14.800 people than it can here. And if we, if we do kind of leveraged things, such as funding the very most

00:30:21.460 important healthcare that they can't buy themselves, then, you know, we can get even maybe a thousand

00:30:27.840 times more effectiveness for people abroad than we can for ourselves. So that's, that's one way to do

00:30:32.920 good. Another way that there's a, there's a cluster around is animal welfare, noting that there's a

00:30:38.600 market failure there where animals, you know, don't have a natural constituency, they can't vote.

00:30:43.880 It wouldn't be surprising if there were massive amounts of pain and suffering, which were being

00:30:48.640 neglected by, by the general capitalist system that we're in. And indeed, when we look at it, you know,

00:30:54.660 that there are. So that was another approach, although it's, there's a, there's a, you have

00:31:00.000 to go out on a limb a little bit about how on earth would you understand animal welfare compared

00:31:05.380 to human welfare in order to, to think about that. But you can see why it could be a really neglected

00:31:09.780 area. And then there's a, there's a kind of branch of people really interested in the long-term future

00:31:15.660 of humanity and noting that only a tiny fraction of all the people who have, who have ever lived

00:31:22.080 are alive at the moment. And it's probably an even tinier fraction when you consider all the people

00:31:26.180 who ever will live after us, that, you know, this is just one century. We've had 2000 centuries of

00:31:33.120 humanity so far. We could have thousands of centuries more after us. If there are ways that we can do

00:31:37.900 something now to have a lasting impact over that whole time, then perhaps that's another location

00:31:43.080 where we can do really outsized amounts of good with our lives. So we've often been thinking about

00:31:49.700 those, those three different areas. Are there trade-offs here with respect to

00:31:55.260 the feeling good versus being effective calculus? Because if you take a, a strictly consequentialist

00:32:04.500 framing of this, well, then it seems like, well, you should just cut through the,

00:32:09.080 the feeling or the, you know, or the perceived reward and salience of various ways of helping

00:32:15.660 and just help the most people. But the situation does strike me somewhat as morally analogous to the,

00:32:23.580 the failure of consequentialism to parse why it makes sense for us to have a preferential love

00:32:30.620 for our family and, and, you know, in particular, our kids. It's often posed as a riddle, you know,

00:32:37.720 how, how, how is it that you can shower more attention and resources and love and concern

00:32:43.180 on your child than you could on two strangers or, and obviously the equation gets even more

00:32:50.220 unbalanced if you talk about a hundred strangers. And that has traditionally struck many people as

00:32:57.080 just a, a failure of consequentialism. Either we're not really consequentialists or we can't be,

00:33:02.920 or we shouldn't be. But I've always seen that as just a, on some level, a failure to get as fine

00:33:10.800 grained as we might about the consequences. I mean, obviously there's a consequence to,

00:33:16.900 if you just think it through, there's a consequence to having a society or being the sort of social

00:33:22.680 primate who could, when faced with a choice to help their child or two strangers, would just

00:33:32.840 automatically default to the, what seems to be the consequentialist arithmetic of, oh, of course I'm

00:33:38.680 going to care more about two strangers than my own child. What do we mean by love and the norm of

00:33:44.780 being a good parent if that is actually the emotional response, right, that we think is normative?

00:33:50.800 And so it's always struck me that there could be something optimal, and it may only be one

00:33:55.900 possible optima, but at least it's a possible one, to have everyone more focused on the people

00:34:03.980 who are near and dear to them and kind of reach some collective equilibrium together where the human

00:34:11.660 emotion of love is conserved in that preferential way. And yet in extreme cases, or even just at the

00:34:18.440 level of which we decide on the uses of public funds and rules of fairness and justice that govern

00:34:24.860 society, we recognize that those need to be impartial, which is to say, when I go into a hospital

00:34:30.440 with my injured daughter, I don't expect the hospital to give us preferential treatment just

00:34:37.340 because she's my daughter. And in fact, I would not want a hospital that could be fully corrupted by

00:34:43.680 just answering to the person who shouted the loudest or gave the biggest tip at the door or

00:34:48.660 whatever it was. I can argue for the norm of fairness in a society, even where I love my daughter more

00:34:53.960 than I love someone else's daughter. It's a long way of saying that that seems to me to be somewhat

00:34:59.360 analogous, or at least potentially so, to this condition of looking to do good in the world and

00:35:05.160 noticing that there are causes, the helping of which gives a much stronger feeling of compassion

00:35:13.420 and solidarity and keeps people more engaged. And I think we do want to leverage that, obviously not

00:35:19.800 at the expense of being ineffective, but I'm just wondering if there's anything to navigate here or if

00:35:26.140 you just think it really is straightforward. We just have to just strip off any notion of

00:35:32.080 kind of the romanticism and reward around helping and just run the numbers and figure out exactly how to

00:35:38.860 prioritize our resources.

00:35:40.620 I guess I would say, here's three levels at which to think about this. So one approach would be to say,

00:35:47.580 yeah, just look at the raw numbers, let's say from some study on how much different ways of spending our

00:35:53.480 money could help people, and then just go with what that says. A second approach would be trying to be a bit

00:35:59.740 more sophisticated, to note that there might be a whole lot of people who just kind of, yeah, who

00:36:05.500 aren't getting enough feedback, perhaps, in their lives about the giving and the effect it's having

00:36:10.680 on people, such that if they were to try to do the first one, that they couldn't really sustain it,

00:36:16.440 which could be a really big deal, because I'm hoping that people can make a commitment and keep it

00:36:21.360 to give for the next 30 years. And if they get burnt out after a couple of years and stop, you've lost

00:36:26.300 almost all the value that they could have produced, especially as they're probably going to earn more

00:36:30.440 money later in their life and be able to give even more. It could be that you lose 99% of the

00:36:34.640 benefit if they give up after the first couple of years. So you at least want to go this one step

00:36:40.280 further and have some idea or some sensitivity to the idea that if it's more appealing or it can be

00:36:47.600 more sustained, then that matters. And I'm thinking in that sense, quite instrumentally,

00:36:53.440 in that it's just trying to take account of the fallibility of the humans who are the givers.

00:36:59.780 It's not about flattering them or kind of like stroking their ego or something like that.

00:37:04.640 But it's the way I think of it, a lot of people, when they think about giving in particular,

00:37:10.060 have a focus that's very focused on the giver. I think of it as giver-centric or donor-centric

00:37:16.040 kind of understanding of it. For example, norms against being public about your giving,

00:37:22.120 I think, are very donor-centric. They're about, well, that would be gauche to be public about it.

00:37:28.400 But from my perspective, I'm very focused on the recipients. And it seems to me that all of this

00:37:33.160 focus on the donor is misplaced. If the recipients would benefit more if the donors were public about

00:37:39.600 it, such that they help to encourage their friends to be giving, for example, by talking about some of

00:37:43.800 these causes, ideally in a non-annoying way, then that could be good for the recipients.

00:37:48.880 And similarly, if there are aspects where maybe if the donor somehow could follow through on a very

00:37:55.900 difficult, dry program of giving, they would be able to give more. If, in fact, many donors fail

00:38:00.600 to achieve that or they get burnt out, then that's bad for the recipients. So this approach is still

00:38:06.380 kind of recipient-focused. Or you could go a step further than that and build it into the structure

00:38:11.860 of what it means to be good at giving and to say, you know, fundamentally, for example, people in your

00:38:18.680 community, or it matters more to give to people who are close to you or something like that.

00:38:23.800 I wouldn't want to go that extra step, although I understand that that is where the kind of intuitive

00:38:29.420 position perhaps is. And you do run into troubles if you try to stop at step two.

00:38:34.120 You run into some of these challenges you're mentioning about how do you justify treating

00:38:39.220 your children better than other people. So I don't think that this is all resolved. But I also

00:38:44.340 want to say that the idea of effective altruism, yeah, really is to be broader than just a consequentialist

00:38:50.860 or utilitarian approach. The people who are non-consequentialists often believe that there

00:38:56.120 are side constraints on action. So there are things that we shouldn't do, even if they promote the

00:39:01.180 good, because it would be wrong or be treating people wrongly in order to do them. For example,

00:39:06.160 that you shouldn't kill someone in order to save 10 people. But since none of the ways we're talking

00:39:11.520 about of giving or of the careers that we're recommending people take, none of them involve

00:39:15.900 really breaking such side constraints, it seems like we should all still be interested in doing

00:39:21.040 more good in that case. As philosophers, we often focus on the interesting conflicts between the

00:39:25.960 different moral theories. But this is a case where I think the moral theories tend to run together.

00:39:29.320 And so that's our focus, you know, going beyond the kind of just what would utilitarianism say,

00:39:35.320 or something like that.

00:39:36.300 Okay, well, let's talk about the greatest downside protection we might find for ourselves and talk

00:39:43.980 about existential risk, which again, is the topic of your new book, The Precipice, which is really a

00:39:49.220 wonderful read. And it's great to have the complete picture pulled together between two covers. So I

00:39:57.260 highly recommend that. We won't exhaust all of what you say there. But I'll flag some of what we're

00:40:03.040 skipping past here. So you break the risks we face into the natural and the anthropogenic,

00:40:12.100 which is to say human caused. And it might be surprising for people to learn just how you weight

00:40:19.700 these respective sources of risk. To give some perspective, let's talk about just how you think

00:40:27.000 about the ways in which the natural world might destroy us, you know, all on its own, and the ways

00:40:33.120 in which we might destroy ourselves, and how you estimate the probability of one or the other sources

00:40:40.160 of risk being decisive for us in the next century.

00:40:43.400 Sure. I think, often when we think about existential risks, we think about things like

00:40:51.160 asteroid impacts. I think this is often the first thing that comes to mind. Because it's what we

00:40:58.360 think destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But, you know, note that that was 65 million years

00:41:06.600 ago. So an event of that size seems to be something like a one in every 65 million years kind of event.

00:41:14.220 It doesn't sound like a once a century event, or you'd have trouble explaining why it hasn't happened,

00:41:18.840 you know, many, many more times. And I think people will be surprised to find out how recent it was

00:41:25.460 that we really understood asteroids, especially people of my generation, that in 1960, that's when we

00:41:32.100 conclusively discovered that meteor craters are caused by asteroids. People thought that maybe

00:41:37.880 they were caused by some kind of geological phenomenon, you know, like volcanism.

00:41:42.240 It's amazing.

00:41:43.060 And then it was 20 years after that, 1980, where evidence was discovered that the dinosaurs had

00:41:50.960 been destroyed in this KT extinction event by an asteroid about 10 kilometers across. So that's,

00:41:58.600 you know, 1980, that's 40 years ago. And then action, you know, things moved very quickly from

00:42:04.380 that. In particular, it was around about the same time as Carl Sagan and others were investigating

00:42:09.560 models for nuclear winter. And they realized that asteroids could have a similar effect,

00:42:15.740 where dust from the asteroid collision would darken the sky, and could in that way cause a mass

00:42:22.240 extinction due to stopping the plants growing. So this is very recent. And people really

00:42:28.580 leapt into action. And astronomers started scanning the skies. And they've now tracked what they think

00:42:35.340 is 95% of all asteroids one kilometer or more across. And one kilometer asteroid is a tenth the

00:42:42.860 size of the one that killed the dinosaurs. But it only has one thousandth of the energy and a thousandth

00:42:48.160 of the mass. So we could very likely survive that. And they've found 95% of those greater than one

00:42:56.060 kilometer across, including almost all of the ones which are really quite big, such as, you know,

00:43:00.640 five kilometers across or 10 kilometers. And so now, the chance of a one kilometer or more asteroid

00:43:07.060 hitting us in the next century is about one in 120,000. That's a kind of scientific probability from

00:43:13.900 the astronomers. But it also wouldn't necessarily wipe us out, even if it did hit us. And that's a

00:43:19.160 probability that we really is very unknown. But overall, I would guess that it's about a one in a

00:43:24.360 million chance that an asteroid destroys us in the next hundred years. And other things that have

00:43:29.340 been talked about as extinction possibilities. When you look at the probabilities, they're extremely

00:43:34.460 low. So an example is a supernova from a nearby star. It would have to be quite a close star within

00:43:41.220 about 30 light years. And it's extremely unlikely. It's unlikely that this will happen during the

00:43:46.940 lifespan of the Earth. And it's exceptionally unlikely it would happen in the next hundred years. I put the

00:43:52.040 chance of existential catastrophe due to that at about one in a billion over the next hundred

00:43:56.540 years. And these are quite rough numbers, but trying to give an order of magnitude idea to the

00:44:02.400 reader. And ultimately, when it comes to all of these natural risks, you might be worried that

00:44:08.160 supernovas and gamma ray bursts and supervolcanoes and asteroids and comets actually, it's very recent

00:44:15.220 that we've discovered how these things work and that we've really realized with proper scientific

00:44:19.280 basis that they could be threats to us. So there's probably more natural risks that we don't even

00:44:23.880 know about that we're yet to discover. So how would you think about that? But there's this very

00:44:29.800 comforting argument from the fossil record when you reflect upon this fact that Homo sapiens has

00:44:37.040 been around for 200,000 years, which is 2,000 centuries. And so if the chance of us being destroyed by

00:44:44.180 natural risks, in fact, all natural risks put together was as high as, say, one in 100, we almost

00:44:50.420 certainly wouldn't have made it this far. So using that kind of idea, you can actually bound the risk

00:44:56.160 and show very confidently that it's lower than about one in 200 per century, and most probably below

00:45:03.540 about one in 2,000 per century. You also take it a little further than that by reasoning by analogy to

00:45:10.340 other hominids and other mammals that would have died in similar extinction events as well.

00:45:15.860 Yeah, that's right. And I give quite a number of different ways of looking at that in order to

00:45:22.380 avoid any potential statistical biases that could come up. In general, it's very difficult to estimate

00:45:28.080 the chance of something that would have stopped the very observation that you're making now of

00:45:33.820 happening. There are certain kinds of statistical biases that come up to do its anthropic effects.

00:45:38.060 But you can avoid all of that, or most of it, by looking at related species, and you get a very

00:45:43.100 similar result. They tend to last around about a million years before going extinct. And so since

00:45:49.640 Homo sapiens is a species that is much more widely spread across the surface of the Earth and much

00:45:55.820 less dependent upon a particular species for food, we're very robust in a lot of ways.

00:46:02.640 So that's before you even get to the fact that we can use our intelligence to adapt to the threat

00:46:07.200 and so forth. That it's very hard to see that the chance of extinction from natural events could be

00:46:14.800 more than something like one in 10,000 per century is where I put it. But unfortunately, the same can't

00:46:21.540 be said for the anthropogenic risks. Yeah. And so let's jump to those. You put the likelihood that we

00:46:30.940 might destroy ourselves in the next century by making some colossal error or just being victim of

00:46:39.800 our own malevolence at one in six rather than one in 10,000, which is a pretty big disparity.

00:46:48.760 One thing that's interesting, especially in the present context of pandemic, you put pandemic risk

00:46:54.920 mostly on the anthropogenic side. Maybe we should talk about that for a second. What are the

00:47:01.440 anthropogenic risks you're most concerned about? And why is it that you're thinking of pandemic

00:47:07.460 largely in the terms of what we do or don't do? Yeah. Well, let's start with the one that started

00:47:16.440 it all off with nuclear war just briefly. That I think it was in 1945, the development of the atomic

00:47:23.700 bomb, that we, humanity really entered this new era, which I call the precipice, giving the book its

00:47:31.100 name. Explain that analogy. So what's interesting here is that the anthropogenic risk, the existential risk,

00:47:40.760 is really just the shadow side of human progress. It's only by virtue of our progress, technologically,

00:47:48.640 largely, although not entirely. I mean, just the fact that we, you know, have crowded together in

00:47:53.360 cities and that we can jump on airplanes and fly all over the world and that we have cultures that

00:47:58.300 value that. And you take the good side of globalization and culture sharing and cosmopolitanism

00:48:06.960 and economic integration. You know, that is perfectly designed, it would seem, to spread a novel virus

00:48:15.460 around the world in about 15 hours. And all of the things that we've been doing right have set us up

00:48:22.960 to destroy ourselves in a way that we absolutely couldn't have done, you know, even a hundred years

00:48:30.420 ago. And so this is, it's a paradox that casts a shadow of sorts on the work of my friend, Steve Pinker,

00:48:38.760 you know, who, as you probably know, has been writing these immense and immensely hopeful books

00:48:44.260 about human progress of late, saying that things are just getting better and better and better.

00:48:49.020 And we should acknowledge that. We should only have the decency to acknowledge that. But

00:48:53.340 he's been criticized rather often for things he hasn't said. He's not saying that there's a law

00:49:00.260 of history that ensures things are going to get better and better. He's not saying we can't screw

00:49:05.460 these things up. But because of his emphasis on progress, at the very least, he can be convicted

00:49:11.780 of occasionally sounding tone deaf on just how the risk that we will destroy everything seems also to

00:49:20.880 be increasing. I mean, just the power of our technology, the fact that we're talking about

00:49:26.040 a time where high school kids can be, you know, manipulating viruses, you know, based on technology

00:49:32.400 they could have in their bedrooms. It's just, this is, we're democratizing a rather Faustian relationship

00:49:39.820 to knowledge and power. And it's easy to see how this could go terribly wrong and wrong in ways that,

00:49:48.360 again, could never have been accomplished a few generations ago. So give us the analogy of the

00:49:55.440 precipice to frame this. Yeah. If we really zoom out and try to look at all of human history and to

00:50:04.220 see the biggest themes that unfolded across this time, then I think that two of them, one is this

00:50:11.020 theme of progress in our well-being that Steven Pinker mentions. And I think particularly in that

00:50:19.440 case over the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, that it's less clear over, you know,

00:50:25.920 it was the second 100,000 years of Homo sapiens better than the first 100,000 or something.

00:50:30.500 Right. I'm not sure. But in the last 200 years, we've certainly seen very marked progress. And I

00:50:37.860 think one of the challenges in talking about that is that we should note that while things have got a

00:50:44.440 lot better, they could still be a lot better again. And we have much further to go. There are many more

00:50:50.080 injustices and suffering remaining in the world. So we certainly want to acknowledge that while at the

00:50:55.960 same time, we acknowledge how much better it's got. And we also want to acknowledge both that there are

00:51:03.780 still very bad things and that we could go much further. But the other major theme, I think, is this

00:51:09.020 theme of increasing power. And that one, I think, has really gone through the whole of human history.

00:51:15.780 And this is something where there have been about 10,000 generations of Homo sapiens. And it's only

00:51:23.420 through a kind of massive intergenerational cooperation that we've been able to build this

00:51:29.560 world we see around us. So from where I sit at the moment, I can see zero things, well, actually,

00:51:35.700 except my own body, which were in the ancestral environment. It's something where we tend to think

00:51:42.580 of this as very recent, but we forget that things like clothing is a technology that was massively useful

00:51:48.140 technology that enabled us to inhabit, you know, huge regions of the world, which would otherwise be

00:51:53.260 uninhabitable by us. You know, you could think of it as almost like, you know, spacesuits or something

00:51:57.300 like that for the earth. You know, massive improvements like this. So many things that

00:52:02.060 we developed before we developed writing, which was only about 5,000 years ago. So this time,

00:52:08.800 like 97% of human history, we don't have any record of it. But that doesn't mean that there

00:52:15.260 weren't kind of these great developments happening. It was just a sequence of innovations that have

00:52:20.140 really built up everything. When I think about that, and these, how we kind of stand on the

00:52:25.220 shoulders of 10,000 generations of people before us, it really is humbling. And all the innovations

00:52:31.440 that they passed on in this unbroken chain. And one of the aspects of this is this increasing power

00:52:37.680 over the world around us, which really accelerated with the scientific revolution, where we discovered

00:52:43.400 these systematic ways to create knowledge and to use it to change the world around us. And the

00:52:47.680 industrial revolution, where we worked out how to harness the huge energy reserves of fossil fuels

00:52:53.800 and to automate a lot of labor using this. Particularly with those accelerations, there's

00:52:59.700 been this massive increase in the power of humanity to change the world. You know, often exponential

00:53:05.560 on many different measures. And that it was in the 20th century, and I think particularly with the

00:53:11.080 development of the atomic bomb, that we first entered this new era where our power is so great

00:53:19.800 that we have the potential to destroy ourselves. And in contrast, the wisdom of humanity has grown

00:53:28.160 only falteringly, if at all, over this time. I think it's been growing. And by wisdom, I mean

00:53:34.340 both wisdom in individuals, but also ways of governing societies, which for all their problems

00:53:41.660 are better now than they were 500 years ago. So there has been improvement in that. And there

00:53:46.420 has been improvement in international relations compared to where we were, say, in the 20th century.

00:53:52.940 But it's a slow progress. And so it leaves us in the situation where we have the power to destroy

00:53:59.620 ourselves without the wisdom to ensure that we don't. And where the risks that we impose upon

00:54:04.940 ourselves are many, many times higher than this background rate of natural risks. And in fact, if

00:54:11.200 I'm roughly right about the size of these risks, where I said one in six, a die roll, that we can't

00:54:19.200 survive many more centuries with risk like that. Especially as I think that, you know, we should expect

00:54:24.640 this power to continue to increase if we don't do anything about it. And the chances to

00:54:29.380 continue to go up of failing irrevocably. And because our whole bankroll is at stake, you know,

00:54:35.600 if we fail once on this level, then that's it. So that would mean that this time period where these

00:54:44.460 risks are so elevated can't last all that long. Either we get our act together, which is what I

00:54:50.500 hope will happen, and we acknowledge these risks and we bring them down, we fight the fires of today,

00:54:57.140 and we put in place the systems to ensure that the risks never get so high again. Either we succeed

00:55:03.480 like that, or we fail forever. Either way, I think this is going to be a short period of something like

00:55:10.760 a couple of centuries or maybe five centuries. You could think of it as analogous to a period like

00:55:17.800 the Renaissance or the Enlightenment or something like that. But a time where there's a really cosmic

00:55:24.680 significance, ultimately, where if humanity does survive it, and we, you know, we live for hundreds

00:55:30.680 of thousands more years, that we'll look back and that this will be what this time is known for,

00:55:36.560 this period of heightened risk. And it also will be one of the most famous times in the whole of

00:55:41.680 human history. And, you know, I say in the book that schoolchildren will study it, and it'll be

00:55:48.160 given a name. And I think we need a name now. And that's why I have been calling it the precipice.

00:55:53.600 And the analogy there is to think of humanity being on this really long journey over these 2000

00:56:00.480 centuries, you know, kind of journey through the wilderness, occasional times of hardship, and also

00:56:05.360 times of sudden progress and heady views. And that in the middle of the 20th century, we found ourselves

00:56:12.160 coming through a high mountain pass and realizing that we'd got ourselves into this very dangerous

00:56:18.260 predicament. And the only way onwards was this narrow ledge along the edge of a cliff with a steep

00:56:24.800 precipice at the side. And we're kind of, you know, inching our way along. And we've got to get through

00:56:30.820 this time. And if we can, then maybe we can reach much safer and more prosperous times ahead. So

00:56:37.720 that's how I see this. Yeah, there's a great opening illustration in your book that looks like

00:56:42.320 the style of an old woodcut of that precipice, which, yeah, you know, that's an, I guess,

00:56:50.080 an intuition that many people share just based on extrapolating the pace of technological change.

00:56:57.820 When you're talking about suddenly being in a world where anyone can potentially order DNA in

00:57:07.180 the mail, along with the tools to combine novel sequences or just recapitulate the recipe for

00:57:16.240 smallpox or anything else that is available, it's hard to see how, I mean, even 500 years seems like

00:57:23.540 an order of magnitude longer than the period here that we just crucially have to navigate without

00:57:31.700 a major misstep. It just seems like the capacity for one person or very few people to screw things up

00:57:40.960 for everyone is just doubling and doubling and doubling again within not just the lifetime of

00:57:47.660 people but within even the span of a decade. So, yeah, it's, and it's given cosmic significance, as you point

00:57:54.220 out, because if you accept the possibility, you know, even likelihood that we are, we are alone in the

00:58:02.180 universe, I don't know how, honestly, I don't have strong intuitions about that. I mean, both the prospect of

00:58:08.320 us being alone and the prospect that the universe is teeming with intelligent life that we haven't

00:58:14.240 discovered yet, both of those things seem just unutterably strange. I don't know which is

00:58:21.560 stranger, but there, I mean, it's a bizarre scenario where either of the possibilities on offer seem

00:58:27.940 somehow uncanny. But if it is the former case, if we're alone, then yes, what we do in a few short

00:58:35.580 years matters enormously, if anything in this universe matters.

00:58:39.940 Indeed. I, ultimately, when thinking about this, I see a handful of different reasons to really

00:58:47.700 think it's extraordinarily important what we do about this moment. It, to some extent,

00:58:53.300 it's just obvious, but I think it can be useful to see that you could, you could understand it in

00:58:59.540 terms of the badness of, of the deaths at the time. If it meant that in a catastrophe,

00:59:05.000 7 billion people were killed. That would be absolutely terrible. But it could be even much

00:59:12.480 worse than that. And you might think, why does it need to be worse than that? Surely that's,

00:59:16.200 that's absolutely terrible already. But the reason that it can matter is because we're not saying that

00:59:22.260 there's a, you know, 50% chance of a particular event that will destroy us. The chances for some

00:59:28.020 things could be lower. For example, I just mentioned the chance of an asteroid or comet impact

00:59:32.840 is substantially lower, but still important, still really important because it's, if it did happen,

00:59:39.440 it wouldn't just be a catastrophe for our generation, but it would, it would wipe out

00:59:45.360 this entire future that humanity could have had, where I think that there's every reason to think

00:59:50.820 that barring such a catastrophe, humanity could live surely at least a million years, which is the

00:59:57.240 typical lifespan of a species. But I don't see much reason to think that we couldn't live out

01:00:02.040 the entire habitable span of the earth's, of the earth's life, which is about 500 million or a billion

01:00:08.640 years, or even substantially beyond that, if we leave the earth. So, and the main challenges to

01:00:16.160 things like space travel are in developing the technologies and in harnessing enough energy.

01:00:22.180 But ultimately, if we've already survived a million years, that's not going to be such an issue. You

01:00:28.920 know, we will have 10,000 more centuries to develop our science and our technologies and to harness the

01:00:33.620 energies. So, ultimately, I think the future could be very long and very vast. So that's, for me, the most

01:00:41.760 motivating one is everything we could lose. And that could be understood in, say, utilitarian terms, as the

01:00:48.300 well-being of all the lives that we would lose. But it could also be understood in all these other

01:00:53.460 forms. And Derek Parfitt talks about this very famously near the end of his magnum opus, Reasons

01:01:00.060 and Persons, where he says that also, if you care about the excellences of humanity, if that's what

01:01:07.040 moves you, then there's, since most of our future is ahead of us, there's every reason to expect that

01:01:12.560 our greatest artworks and our most just societies and our most profound discoveries lie ahead of us as

01:01:19.060 well. So, whatever it is that you care about, there's reason to think that most of it lies in the

01:01:25.680 future. But then there's also, you could think about the past. You could think about the fact that human

01:01:31.500 society is necessarily this intergenerational partnership, as Burke put it, and that, you know, our

01:01:38.320 ancestors kind of built up this world for us, and have, you know, 10,000 generations, and then have

01:01:45.360 entrusted it to us, and so that we can make our own innovations and improvements and pass it down to our

01:01:50.940 children, and that if we fail, we would be the worst of all these generations, and we would be betraying

01:01:58.300 the trust that they've placed in us. So, you can think of it in terms of the present, the deaths, the future

01:02:05.340 that would be lost, the past that would be betrayed, or perhaps also in terms of this cosmic

01:02:10.840 significance. If we're the only place where there is perhaps life in the universe, or that the only

01:02:16.320 place where there is intelligent life, or the only place where there are beings that are influenced by

01:02:22.760 moral reasoning, so the only place where there's this kind of upwards force in the universe pushing

01:02:27.780 towards what is good and what is just. If humans are taken out, for all the value that there is in the

01:02:33.580 natural world, and I think that there is a vast amount, there's no other beings which are trying

01:02:40.020 to make the world, you know, more good and more just. If we're gone, things will just meander on

01:02:46.680 their own course with the animals doing their own things. So, there's a whole lot of different ways

01:02:51.820 of seeing this, and Derek Parfitt also pointed out this really useful thought experiment, I think,

01:02:57.020 which is, he imagined these three different scenarios. There's peace, there's a nuclear war

01:03:03.720 in which 99% of all people die, and there's a nuclear war in which 100% of all people die.

01:03:10.000 And obviously, the war where 100% of people die is the worst, followed by the war where 99% of people

01:03:15.460 die. But he said, which of those differences is bigger? And he said that most people would say that

01:03:22.200 the difference between peace and 99% of people dying is the bigger difference. But he thought

01:03:27.260 that because with that last 1%, some kind of discontinuous thing happens where you lose the

01:03:33.620 entire future, and that thus, that was the bigger difference. And there's this reason to be especially

01:03:40.000 concerned with what are now called existential risks.

01:03:44.900 Yeah. So, obviously, that final claim that the difference between 2 and 3 is bigger than the

01:03:50.080 difference between 1 and 2, that is going to be provocative for some people. And I think it does

01:03:55.820 expose another precipice of sorts. It's a precipice of moral intuition here, where people find it

01:04:04.000 difficult to think about the moral significance of unrealized opportunity, right? So, because on some

01:04:13.140 level of cancellation, fear of cancellation...

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - June 23, 2020

#208 — Existential Risk

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