Three Sentences That Could Change the World — and Your Life

Today’s show is built around three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. And we can make their lives better.” Those sentences form the foundation of an ethical framework known as “longtermism.” They might sound obvious, but to take them seriously is a truly radical endeavor — one with the power to change the world and even your life. That second sentence is where things start to get wild. It’s possible that there could be tens of trillions of future people, that future people could outnumber current people by a ratio of something like a million to one. And if that’s the case, then suddenly most of the things we spend most of our time arguing about shrink in importance compared with the things that will affect humanity’s long-term future. William MacAskill is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, the director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and the author of the forthcoming book, “What We Owe the Future,” which is the best distillation of the longtermist worldview I’ve read. So this is a conversation about what it means to take the moral weight of the future seriously and the way that everything — from our political priorities to career choices to definitions of heroism — changes when you do. We also cover the host of questions that longtermism raises: How should we weigh the concerns of future generations against those of living people? What are we doing today that future generations will view in the same way we look back on moral atrocities like slavery? Who are the “moral weirdos” of our time we should be paying more attention to? What are the areas we should focus on, the policies we should push, the careers we should choose if we want to guarantee a better future for our posterity? And much more. Mentioned: "Is A. I. the Problem? Or Are We?" by The Ezra Klein Show "How to Do The Most Good" by The Ezra Klein Show "This Conversation With Richard Powers Is a Gift" by The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: “Moral Capital” by Christopher Leslie Brown “The Precipice” by Toby Ord “The Scout Mindset” by Julia Galef Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. ​​“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  Today's show is built around three sentences that could, I think that should, change the future. Here they are. "Future people count. There could be a lot of them." "We can make their lives better." That is it. They sound obvious even banal. But two things are true about them. First, we do not act as if they are true. We do not act day to day as if future people count. We do not take seriously our responsibility to them. And second, buried in those sentences are startling possibilities, particularly the second one. The number of people there could yet be is mind-boggling. You don't need particularly strange assumptions to think it plausible

• 1:06Ezra Klein?

  that future people could outnumber current people by a ratio of 10,000 to 1, 100,000 to 1, a million to 1, or even more. Those three sentences are the foundation of a worldview called long-termism. And I don't agree with everything that its most hardcore adherents take from it. You'll hear that in this episode. But I even more profoundly disagree with how much most of us dismiss or ignore in it. And day to day, I include myself in that number. This is a worldview worth grappling with. Maybe not the only one we should use to evaluate our actions and our policies, but certainly one of the ones we should be using. And so I asked Will McCaskill, a philosopher at Oxford University, a founder of the Effective Altruism Movement, and the author of the forthcoming book, What We Owe the Future,

• 1:51Ezra Klein?

  which is probably the best single-book distillation of long-termism you'll find, to come on the show and talk through this worldview, its ideas, and its challenges. As always, my email, if you have guest suggestions, feedback, recommendations for things we should read or watch or listen to, [email protected].

• 2:15Ezra Klein?

  Will McCaskill, welcome to the show.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me on.

• 2:19Ezra Klein?

  So something I love about long-termism is that it's really just built on three sentences. Future people count, there could be a lot of them, we can make their lives better. Walk me through them.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll take each one in turn. So the idea that future people count, that is, their interests matter morally and we should take their interests seriously in just the same way we take the interests of people alive today seriously. I think that idea is just common sense. So when we consider the issue of climate change, sure, there are lots of harms that will impact us in the present generation, but it will also, you know, carbon dioxide that we emit today, a significant fraction of that will stay in the atmosphere. And it seems perfectly intuitive that that's a big deal. The geophysical impacts we have on such timescales, we should pay attention to. Or when we consider radioactive nuclear waste, again, we are thinking kind of thousands

• 3:18Speaker 01

  of years into the future where if you harm someone, it really seems to not matter intuitively whether you've harmed that person in a year's time or 10 years' time or 100 years' time. Harm just matters morally whenever it occurs. So that's the first idea. The second is just that there could be enormous numbers of future people. So I think that we might stand at the very beginning of history where there have been 300,000 years of Homo sapiens existence in the past. If we last as long as a typical mammal species, we've got about 700,000 years still to go.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  If we survive past that using technology to mitigate risks to our own extinction, well, the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions of years. And perhaps we could even extend humanity's lifespan beyond that if we take to the stars. And then we're thinking billions of years. And the key thing is not like any particular precise estimate of how much what humanity's life expectancy is, you know, we don't know that for sure. But on basically any reasonable estimate, if we don't cause our own extinction in the next few centuries, then the number of future people could be absolutely prodigious, tens of trillions of people, or maybe even trillions of trillions of people, such that the number

• 4:41Speaker 01

  of future people, even on a very conservative estimate, outnumber us something like a thousand to one. So then the final claim, that we in the present really can influence how the course of the future goes. That's what I dedicate most of what we are the future to discussing. But I think there are two main ways of impacting the very long term. One is by reducing the risk of unrecoverable civilizational collapse or human extinction, such as by ensuring we don't develop next generation weapons of mass destruction like bioweapons, or just trying to prevent a third world war that could end us all.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And then a second is by improving the quality of life of those in the future, such as by avoiding perpetual totalitarian state, or the takeover of AI systems that could devote, you know, mean that future civilization is just alien and valueless from our perspective. So those are the three core ideas of long-termism.

• 5:44Ezra Klein?

  So I want to explore them a little bit more, but before we get into them, I want to open some space for skepticism, because these all sound simple, but they're quite controversial, where they lead is quite controversial. And you yourself say that when you first heard the arguments for long-termism, they quote, "left you cold." Why did they leave you cold?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  I think two main reasons why these ideas left me cold. So at the time, I was co-founding an organization called Giving What We Can, and my interest was very much focused on improving the lives of the very poorest people in the world. So there are many extremely urgent and pressing problems, not least the fact that thousands of children every day die unnecessarily of easily preventable diseases. And so when faced with problems of such salience and urgency, the thought of then taking action for people I haven't met that don't even exist yet,

• 6:46Speaker 01

  that's like an abstract argument clashing with the very real pull of problems around today. And I was initially resistant to that. And then a second is just the question of, well, okay, even if I grant that there is an enormous amount at stake when it comes to the future of civilization, well, what can we even do about it? Where the particular, at the time, and we're talking about 12 years ago, the particular avenues for making a difference seemed just extremely speculative to me. And that just made me think, look, I want to be doing something that is more reliably making a difference, where I'm learning, I'm getting feedback loops, I'm able to tell that I'm actually making a positive impact

• 7:30Speaker 01

  and then kind of improve how well I'm doing from there. What changed for you? Two things changed. One was just the weight of the arguments over time, where in particular, the arguments for not really thinking about the long-term future and not really considering the interests of future people. Well, those future people are disenflanchised. They are of necessity, voiceless. And it just started to really seem to me that concern for future generations was like the next step of moral progress, that in the past, people in positions of power have made moral progress by taking seriously the interests of those who are unfairly disempowered.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Now, this is a bit of a different case because those in the future, like, there's nothing we can do to empower them, but we can at least take their interests more seriously. And then in terms of the second aspect of, well, can you actually make a difference? Over the last 10 years, I've just seen enormous progress to make me think that like, yes, actually, we can. So the field of AI safety, it was utterly fringe back in 2009, is now a pretty mainstream area of machine learning research, at least comparatively mainstream and respectable. And you're able to see kind of the ways even now in which AI systems are doing things that we really don't intend and like concrete work we can do to like

• 8:57Speaker 01

  reduce those risks. And then even to an even greater degree, one of the big risks that was being discussed all the way back in 2009 was risk from pandemics. And in the kind of broader effective altruism community, we were encouraging people to work on pandemic preparedness. We were funding organizations in that area from about 2014. And the fact that, I mean, we didn't make nearly as much progress as I would have liked, but I think we did something to help. And now, when I think about what are the things we could be doing, such as early detection systems, so just scanning wastewater all around the world for new pathogens, or certain methods of being detected against respiratory diseases

• 9:41Speaker 01

  and new pathogens, like there's a certain type of lighting that is safe for humans, but sterilizes airborne pathogens, so far UVC it's called. You know, it really does seem like with funding and a bit of activism, we could get that installed in most light bulbs around the world. And that really could make an enormous difference to reducing the chance of the next pandemic, which could be a lot worse, while also at the same time having enormous benefits for the present, potentially just eliminating airborne diseases. And so it really seems like these things actually are a lot more tractable than I thought they were about a decade ago.

• 10:19Ezra Klein?

  So I want to go through a couple of these premises. And I want to start with the first one. Future people count. It sounds obvious. The word you used was intuitive.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:31Ezra Klein?

  And I think the evidence is it isn't intuitive. I think it sounds obvious, but we obviously make many decisions without really counting future people at all. And nor is it simple how you would do that. Should I think of somebody born hypothetically, potentially 1,000 years from now? Should they have the worth of one child now? Of point one children now? Of point oh one children now? How do you? How do you decide how much future people count?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  So a thought experiment I give is just drop some glass while hiking on a trail. And you then find out that someone has cut their hand on that glass. Now, does it make a difference if that was, you know, occurred next year? Or if it was a message from the future? I think as long as you've got the like certainty that this harm has occurred. I actually do think it's pretty common sense, morally speaking, to be just as concerned about that as if you'd say harmed a stranger. And when we don't pay attention to the interests of future generations, I think it's got more to do with things like uncertainty.

• 11:44Ezra Klein?

  The next sentence there is, there could be a lot of them. And this is where the math of your book is a lot to take on. So I want to quote here. "To illustrate the potential scale of the future. Suppose that we only last as long as a typical mammal species. That is, around 1 million years. And assume that our population continues at its current size. In that case, there'd be 80 trillion people yet to come. Future people would outnumber us 10,000 to 1."

• 12:15Ezra Klein?

  And I'll be honest that this is both very compelling to me. It's hard logic to deny and is often where long-termism leaves me a little unsettled because it creates a kind of mathematical blackmail. There are so many hypothetical lives in the future, 80 trillion people, that anything that makes them on any calculation infinitesimally better is worth more than almost anything we could do now. And something about that seems wrong. I think it can even seem dangerous. You can imagine really starving people of resources now to make very uncertain improvements in the future. How do you think about that trade-off?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think this, I think this idea of like, oh, we should just be fanatically pursuing whatever is our best guess at promoting the very long-term is also something I am like, even like, no matter how tiny of the probability, is also something I would feel very nervous about. And if that were the case for long-termism, I just wouldn't be promoting it. But that's okay, because some of the risks that we are facing, such as from a third world war, or from a worst-case pandemic, or from, you know, the creation of AI agents that are even smarter than humans, these are like really, you know, they're like as

• 13:36Speaker 01

  big as the risk of dying in a car crash, maybe even greater. And we should, you know, so then definitely not in this like vanishingly small kind of probability territory. Then the second thing I'll say, which is like a more substantive way in which this reasoning, I don't think always works, is that sometimes people think, oh, well, the only way you can impact the very, very long-term future is by reducing the risk of extinction. And so, nothing else to a first approximation matters apart from that. And in what we are the future, I'm kind of arguing against that perspective. I'm actually arguing that there are lots of ways of impacting the long-term future. And

• 14:20Speaker 01

  In fact, you know, at the moment, the amount of resources that are being spent trying to protect the interests of future people is like vanishingly small. Maybe it's like 0.01% of GDP. I don't know exactly, but it's very low. And I'm kind of saying like, okay, it should be higher than that. Maybe 0.1%, maybe even a whole percentage point.

• 14:39Ezra Klein?

  Let me get at the uncertainty of some of this. So, so imagine we go back to an example you just gave, which is preventing a world war. Seems good. I'd prefer no world wars.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:52Ezra Klein?

  But imagine trying to operationalize that question. So somehow I give you a button that could have prevented World War II. Would that have made the world better or worse off?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Would, what happens in, what's the counterfactual?

• 15:14Ezra Klein?

  That's my, that's a bit of my point that, I mean, obviously the famous version of this counterfactual is, do you kill baby Hitler?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:22Ezra Klein?

  But at different points, when World War II is looming in a more near term way, I think we look back on people who were trying to prevent it and we call them now appeasers and we think they were making decisions that were foolish or potentially morally wrong. Now, obviously it would be good to not have the Nazis rise up. Is it good that we invented nuclear weapons? I don't know. I only ask this because it seems to me the band of uncertainty, even in things that seem really, really bad, in the very long term analysis, is very hard to narrow, which

• 16:03Ezra Klein?

  makes me somewhat skeptical that it is so knowable, even for things that seem quite good.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  So I think, I mean, you point to have, you know, a very important issue, which is that you can have competing considerations on either side. So in the case of World War II, as a matter of fact, that war meant that nuclear weapons were developed and used, which is obviously increasing existential risk. However, the alternative, like, the Nazis really did have aims at, like, large-scale domination over the world. They had, like, a horrific ideology, and they wanted that ideology to persist for a very long time, maybe even indefinitely. And again, in the book, I argue

• 16:53Speaker 01

  that, you know, they really might have succeeded. I don't think they were close to ever winning the Second World War, let alone having world domination. But if you tweak history, if such that, you know, that really did happen, I think a kind of global totalitarian state that was enacted now via future technology could persist indefinitely. Now, we get into this really hard question of, okay, we've got perhaps potential increase in existential risk from a war, but perhaps that is a war is necessary to prevent the rise of some, like, dangerous ideology. Maybe that's just an extremely hard question. If so, that's

• 17:34Speaker 01

  the circumstance we're in, and I think we should face that. But I think we can make progress, at least by starting to think precisely about this. For example, thinking, how much worse would the future be if it were a global totalitarian state forever compared to a liberal, democratic, thriving future civilization? Secondly, like, how much is the risk of unrecovered collapse or all-out human extinction going to increase on the basis of, you know, some war? And I think we can at least start to make our reasoning more precise there. I know that you have worries about the use of precise probabilities.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  I think it's just extraordinarily helpful to advance debates, to be able to use such kind of precise probability estimates. And then I think we can start to at least reason to say, okay, yeah, no, actually, I do think maybe the risk of ideological lock-in from fascism is actually sufficiently great and sufficiently bad that it would be worth, let's say, a 0.1% increase in extinction risk or something.

• 19:13Ezra Klein?

  Something I found striking in the book is how important values change becomes for you under a long-term analysis. Tell me why.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  The reason values become so important is twofold. One is that, and this is a way in which I differ somewhat from some other long-termist thinkers, when I look to the long-term future, I see, I think there could be a dramatic amount of contingency in what model values guide the future. And I talk a lot about the abolition of slavery as a historical example of something that at least arguably was significantly contingent, like, we could have a world which has today's level of technological development, yet widespread slavery, were it not for particular cultural changes and model campaigns that occurred.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  And that's huge. I mean, if you look to a future that does or does not have legally permitted slavery, that makes an enormous difference to the value of those societies that are to come. But then, secondly, I think that...

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Future technology could enable what I call value lock-in, where a particular ideology or a particular set of moral beliefs gets entrenched indefinitely. And it's a more kind of complex argument. But and I think there are many technologies or social developments that could make this happen. But a crucial one is artificial intelligence, where if there is at some point of time, and that time might be much faster than you might naturally think, when the ruling beings are digital rather than human. Well, then, power could be in the hands of beings that are imprevisibly immortal. And so a significant reason for why we get moral change over time,

• 21:09Speaker 01

  namely that people die, and including like harsh dictators die, that would be removed. And I actually think it could well be that the values that are predominant today or over the coming centuries could actually be the same values that guide the entire course of the future.

• 21:28Ezra Klein?

  Let's go to your slavery example for a bit here. And I'd like you to tell the story you tell there in somewhat more detail, because I think it's a good way of grounding this idea that values and values change can be contingent. So why do you think the abolition of slavery was contingent?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Sure. So for context, slavery has been for most of history since the agricultural era. Slavery was almost ubiquitous. It was prevalent in most societies in one form or another. And so we should ask, and obviously there was, you know, always enormous like resistance, the slaves of cells.

• 22:10Ezra Klein?

  And it should be said, there's still pockets of slavery today, but

• 22:13Speaker 01

  There's still pockets of slavery today.

• 22:15Ezra Klein?

  In terms of large-term values, it isn't it isn't seen as acceptable.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  In the world today, especially if you include forced marriage, something like 0.5% of the world's population is in some form of slavery. But for context, in 1700, that number was like three-quarters of the world's population. So the sheer prevalence of slavery in history is like often underappreciated. I didn't appreciate it till I really started learning about this.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yet, that changed in the course of the 19th century in particular, although there was, you know, an abolitionist movement that was successful. And the major empires of the world abolished slavery, though some countries still had slavery well into the 20th century, like legally permitted slavery. And so we might ask, why did that happen? And again, before learning about this, I thought, oh, it was economic matters. Kind of mechanization and automation meant that slavery became obsolete, rather than the result of kind of model campaigns from those who opposed slavery. I think that argument doesn't work. And actually, the mainstream view among historians who study the topic

• 23:28Speaker 01

  is that the kind of economic argument for why slavery ended does not work. And there's many reasons for this, but just a couple of it. Firstly, the slave trade was booming at the time of abolition. The number of enslaved people transported across the transatlantic was increasing. There was, you know, an intense lobby from slave owners who were making significant profits. So that's kind of one line of argument. The second is just that even in the world today, there's enormous amount of unmechanized labor. There's also just many uses of enslaved people historically that such as like sex slavery or households, you know, being a household servant,

• 24:10Speaker 01

  that just will not be, you know, will not for a long time be threatened by mechanization. And so this kind of argument just doesn't really explain why it happened when it did, nor why it happened in such a kind of further going way. In contrast, you can look to model changes that were happening and look to the kind of particular abolitionist campaign that arose out of the Quakers originally, actually starting in the 17th century, but then were very successful in convincing both the British public and the British elites. To change their laws and attitudes to enslavement and then undertake like really

• 24:50Speaker 01

  quite striking costs to abolish slavery where the British Empire suffered costs of about like 2% of their gross national product for about 60 years, which is like several times, four times in fact, what Britain currently spends on kind of foreign aid. And so the overall picture is just that what happened here was like there was cultural change, there was moral activism, and that was the main driving force. And the economics of it, while also kind of obviously relevant to what happened, are not the thing that like ended slavery.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Tell me about Benjamin Lay. Benjamin Lay was one of the early abolitionists, born in the late 17th century and an activist in the early 18th century. And he was a Quaker, he was also a dwarf, and referred to himself as Little Benjamin, likening himself to Little David who slew Goliath. And he is just this remarkable character who became well-known across all of Pennsylvania for engaging in guerrilla theater and very kind of bold activism because he deeply opposed slave owning and thought it was inconsistent with Quaker Christian principles.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  And so he did just, you know, there are just dozens of incredible stories about his activism. So he would shout and harass slave owners at Quaker meetings, get kicked out of the meeting and just lay face down in the mud so that everyone leaving the meeting just had to walk over him in order to leave. Or he would just stand in the snow in kind of bare feet. And then when people were asked like, why is he doing that? He would point out that enslaved people would have to, you know, suffer like that the entire winter. Or at one point in the, during a Quaker meeting, he brought a kind of fake Bible into the meeting and said that By owning an enslaved person,

• 26:55Speaker 01

  you are committing as grievous a sin in the face of God as you would be by, as he does, by stabbing this Bible, which then sprayed fake blood over everyone in the audience. And so he became incredibly well-known. And, you know, it's not entirely documented, the kind of paths for this influence, but it seems they were very great, in particular on a next generation of Quaker activists, and in particular Anthony Benazet, who was kind of the kind of much milder, much meeker, repackaged many of these ideas in ways that made them continuous with Enlightenment thought, and then was enormously influential on getting the abolitionist campaign started in Britain.

• 27:41Ezra Klein?

  You argue, in part based on this story, but also based on this larger idea that values can be changed and that value change can ripple forever for the value of being a moral weirdo. What is a moral weirdo to you? And who are some great moral weirdos today?

• 28:01Speaker 01

  So a moral weirdo, for me, is someone who believes things that are not widely accepted by society. Perhaps they're even, you know, looked down upon or ridiculed by wider society. Nonetheless, that person kind of stands up for what they believe in. And that doesn't necessarily mean that the right thing to do is to engage in guerrilla theater. Perhaps it's like Benazet, you should take a more cooperative or diplomatic approach. But nonetheless, you're willing to kind of go out on a limb for what you believe in morally. And I think that can be enormously impactful.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  So in the book, I talk about a movement that inspires me in particular, and I know inspires you, which is the animal welfare movement. I talk about Leah Gose's as a story who... Was the president of Mercy for Animals. But she's just a representative of a much wider array of people who are speaking out for concern for the interests of non-human animals and have actually had enormous success at getting essentially all the major fast food chains, all the major retailers, to move away from caged eggs and make pledges to say they will no longer use caged eggs. And throughout history, I mean, a spiking thing, actually, is a digression, is lots of the early abolitionists were also vegetarian. So this was through with Benjamin Lay, it was through with Benazir.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  I think there's kind of a lesson there. But yeah, the animal, you know, animal welfare activists, of which Leah is just one, are just these, in my view, kind of moral heroes where tides are changing and moral attitudes are improving, I think, quite rapidly with respect to the interests of non-human animals. But even very recently, even, you know, 15 years ago, when I first became vegetarian, it was just easily the subject of ridicule and people found it kind of laughable that you would care about the interests of non-human animals. And so I'm really excited to see that change.

• 30:04Ezra Klein?

  I mean, it still is, soy boy.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 30:08Ezra Klein?

  But I want to push you on this point about moral weirdos because I would say you had to have, as an example, the weirdos of PETA. So that Leah Garza, who I admire enormously, she was on this podcast back when it was at Vox. So Leah Garza is could be normal, right? So she could actually have as mainstream a role as she does. And so I want to push you again on this. I want to know who you think are the moral weirdos today, who are out there saying things that are not mainstream, that are maybe even a little bit reviled and who refuse to pipe down? I think it's a bit of a dodge to only locate these people in the deep past. Who do you look at today and think, huh, in 50 years, we may look at them and say,

• 30:54Ezra Klein?

  They were on the right side of this and we should have listened.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, someone who clearly leaps to my mind here is Eliezer Yudkowsky, where I have lots of disagreements with Eliezer, but he was advocating for taking seriously the risk of advanced artificial intelligence for years and years, just kind of in the wilderness on his blog with some kind of followers. And I think he would be complimented by the title of a weirdo, and he certainly is one, and lots of people find him very weird. And like I say, I have disagreements with him, but I think the fact that he was able and willing to advocate for what is, I think, a very important cause over the course of decades,

• 31:40Speaker 01

  that's just very admirable, I think.

• 31:45Ezra Klein?

  The moral philosopher Peter Singer once argued to me that moral reasoning is a social activity by and large. We mostly figure out right and wrong in terms of how those around us think and act about right and wrong. Do you think there's truth to that?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that, and this is something I'm almost wanting to push against a little bit, is I think that by and large, for morality, I mean, for many things, but morality in particular, we tend to just go with a group and we tend to assume the beliefs of our peer group. And it really is quite costly. I mean, if you're a lefty and all your friends are on the left and you're having a conversation about politics, it just often is, depending on your group, but can be costly to then like voice a kind of heterodox opinion. And

• 32:44Speaker 01

  that's got nothing to do with kind of the left in particular, that's also true in the right, it's also true of like, you know, many, many kind of political interest groups. If you're part of the environmentalists and then you come out in support of nuclear power, then, you know, people have a hostile reaction to you, at least in many circles. And so I think we're very natural to pick up the beliefs of our peers. And I think...

• 33:11Speaker 01

  The power of reason that Peter Singer points to is that we can actually try and move beyond that and just like really think things through and then with courage kind of stand up for those cases where we think that the people around us are making a mistake.

• 33:26Ezra Klein?

  Well, one thing I take from that, because I do think it's true, and I think, look at how we treat dogs versus look at how we treat pigs, if you doubt it. But then it really matters, not just how individuals reason morally, but how cultures and groups do. Benjamin Lay, as you mentioned, was a Quaker. And I think the Quakers have an unusually impressive history of being on the right side of big issues quite long before others are. They seem very moral. What in your view makes Quakers so good at collective moral reasoning?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  It's a great question. And I think there are two aspects to kind of desirable model social epistemology, you could call it, like, culture that is like good for making model progress. One is just kind of everyone is unified in really wanting to act in accordance with what's morally correct. That's not true for all cultures. And then the second, and so kind of just taking morality seriously is like a big core of it. And then a second

• 34:42Speaker 01

  is kind of being willing to tolerate dissent. And in fact, you know, you can even encourage kind of diversity of ideas and intellectual engagement and so on. I think with kind of the move towards Protestantism within Christianity, like, one distinctive part of that was there was a culture that was more about Anyone can kind of access the Word of God by reading the Bible, by thinking things through for themselves, rather than it being dictated and high. And I think that was a completely important cultural transition. And so that kind of, you know, that doesn't single out the Quakers in particular, but then I think they do have this, you know, at least historically,

• 35:27Speaker 01

  had this distinctive thing of really taking morality seriously. I mean, the idea of the word Quaker comes from quaking before God. I mean, and also then, you know, there's these familiar, you know, Quaker meetings where it's in silence and anyone can speak and the Word of God can speak through that person. This again is this kind of like intellectually egalitarian ethos, where in principle, anyone could have a new moral insight. That could be God speaking through you. And that, I think, is like hugely important. I mean, not the like appeal to gods, but the kind of intellectual egalitarianism, I think, is hugely important in terms of being able to make moral progress. Because you get like a greater diversity of ideas. You get a greater kind of clash of good arguments.

• 36:13Ezra Klein?

  Something you wrote that I've been reflecting on is that, quote, "We might naturally think that slave owners really knew, deep down, that what they were doing was wrong and that they didn't care. We should be careful not to imagine the views and values of other people as being more similar to our own than they really are." And you go on to note that quite a few famed thinkers who dedicated much of their lives to moral reflection accepted slavery. So that was true for Plato, for Aristotle, for St. Augustine, for Quinus, for Immanuel Kant.

• 36:46Ezra Klein?

  What are some ideas that come to mind to you that are not only accepted today socially, but defended by prominent moral thinkers, but you suspect may come to be seen as abhorrent in 300 or 3,000 years?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  So we've already talked about animals. And that's in my experience, when I raise this thought experiment with people, they immediately point to animals.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Which is damning. We already know it. Which is damning, absolutely. A second, I think, is the treatment of prisoners. So think of the abhorrence with which we think about corporal punishment. So if in the US there was someone who was beaten as a punishment, they would be absolutely outraged. But now ask yourself, supposing that you were, rightly or wrongly, convicted of a crime, and you had the choice, you could spend four years in jail, separated from your partner, from your kids, from everything you know, from your work, or you could be whipped 20 times. Which would you choose? I think probably you would choose to be whipped. I mean, I'm not sure.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  I certainly would. But then that suggests that the harm that we would be doing to you by putting you behind bars for four years is greater than the harm of being whipped. But what's the difference? Well, it's much less salient, like it's much less visceral. And so, yeah, I think it's very plausible that the way we will regard the prison system today is with utter abhorrence. Whereas other people defend it. Like, it's good. It's like, people deserve to be punished. And then a final one, I think, is greater kind of weight given to co-nationals, where, you know, very many people endorse nationalism.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  And there are some ways in which that can be good. Like, I'm Scottish, I love Scotland, I love the cultural traditions. But that's very different from saying that, you know, the people in my nation are more morally important than the people in other nations. Whereas that is a very common view. And, yeah, again, I think like, a future world where we've made moral progress will take much more seriously the moral idea that everyone's interests should count equally.

• 39:39Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about your idea of plasticity.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  The idea of plasticity is that there are moments in time when change is much easier. So, an analogy I give is, kind of, history is molten glass. When one is glassblowing, while the glass is hot, it can be molded into many different shapes. And the shapes could be beautiful in the end, they could be disfigured, they could have cracks in them. But then, when the glass is harder, it's much harder to change things. And I think you often get periods of plasticity on a small scale, where after the Second World War, I think there was enormous plasticity in the global order, where there was the formation of institutions like the UN.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  There were decisions to be made about the use of, you know, how to handle politically the use of nuclear weapons, where one plan on the table was that the UN would just control all fissile material, no one would have nuclear weapons. Now, that's just so outside the Overton window of what policy proposals, you know, for handling nuclear weapons is this, like, that's obviously not going to happen now. But it at least was on the table after World War II. So I think, kind of, in periods of crisis, or when technologies are new, or where institutions are new. So, after the formation of the United States, there were many constitutional amendments. In the last 50 years, we have only had one constitutional amendment, and even that one was proposed in the late 18th century.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  At those periods, things can be plastic, things can be moved and actually change. But then, you get kind of intrenchment of norms, of laws, of interests, and that makes change much harder to occur. And this, I think, is very relevant, because actually, I think that, like, maybe the world as a whole is in this period of plasticity. But it's also relevant for what we choose to focus on, where...

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Bill McKibben, leading environmentalist, talks about climate change, says, "Things were much more plastic decades ago, 50 years ago, when we really had a still a reasonable understanding of the science then. We could have taken more action, we could have made a bigger difference with less effort then. And change is much harder now that things are much more politicized." When I look to new issues that are developing, such as the rise of powerful AI systems, such as advances in biotechnology, we have this unusually good opportunity to take action to make sure that things go in a positive direction, where a decade after the development of technology, perhaps things have gotten politicized and it's much more difficult to make change.

• 42:25Ezra Klein?

  How do you think about the tension between these two directions of devoting our moral attention? So, one version is, "Look for where there is plasticity, look for, you know, we can do more right now on pandemics than we could do at other times in human history." People are aware of it, they're afraid of them, there's maybe some appetite, but not as much as I wish for action. Biotech is another good example, AI safety. On the other hand, we just had this whole conversation about something that probably looked very rigid, but was in fact not, which was slavery. As you said, that had been the norm in human cultures for a very long time, and then all

• 43:08Ezra Klein?

  of a sudden, at least within the scale of human history, it wasn't. So if you were looking at some of the other things you just mentioned, but you're entrenched, the way we treat animals, the way we treat prisoners, the way we treat people outside of our own borders, I think a plasticity analysis would say, "That's probably too hard." And the more values-oriented analysis you were offering would say, "History shows things can change very quickly."

• 43:42Ezra Klein?

  How do you think about that?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, a great thing to push on. In the case of the abolitionist movement, I actually think that there was a moment of plasticity that was being taken advantage of. And this is the analysis by a historian, Christopher Leslie Brown at Columbia that I'm very influenced by. He argues that the, in particular, American War of Independence, created this moment of plasticity for how Britain and the British Empire conceptualized itself. Where essentially, he argues that this was just an enormous blow to the kind of British self-image and the British project.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  And so they used abolition of slavery as a way of kind of regaining what he calls moral capital, but kind of regaining kind of moral status and giving a way to like look down at the people in the US who are still slave owners. So there is an argument there. I also think that the kind of burgeoning industrial revolution, and in particular, the much greater, the ease of like spreading information was again a kind of moment of plasticity where the abolitionists, they were the first like social campaign, as we really think about it. You know, they were the first people to get engaged in kind of mass petitions.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  And I kind of think they were like, had the kind of first strike, as it were, where they could engage in this kind of mass mobilization campaign, doing petitions, taking them to parliament. And the kind of natural opponents, like the plantation lobby, didn't really know what they were getting hit with. But then people learn over time. So there's like new kind of social tactic or social, even social technology that they could then like, you know, now you have misinformation coming from the people that activists kind of campaigned for. So in this case, I actually do think it like at least plausibly occurred at this moment of plasticity. With these other things, you're absolutely right, that things are like quite entrenched.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, moments of plasticity can occur. And I think the correct plan, if you're the kind of activist, is that you build up these general purpose resources and then at key moments, then you can like actually put them into, kind of put them into action. And so I think if you study the history of the neoliberal movement, this is kind of what happened. The period of the 50s and the 60s was really spent just like growing the power of neoliberals, those who believe in free market economics, such that in the 70s, when stagflation happened, then they just had this enormous kind of portfolio of, they could say, basically, I told you so, pushed forward their like new economic agenda.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  And for better or worse, that was enormously influential. And so when we're looking at like animal wellbeing, if we're looking at prisoners, if we're looking at people in other nations, then looking for these moments of plasticity and like prepping in advance, I think is very important. And just taking the animal case, I think like the introduction of in vitro meat, that is meat grown in labs, is just going to be one of these moments of plasticity where, for example, can you call it meat legally? That is something that like existing meat producers are not going to want you to be able to do, but could be very important for like how widespread adoption is.

• 47:15Ezra Klein?

  In vitro meat, if it becomes a widespread reality, which I very much hope it will, is an interesting alternative way to think about this question, because we've been talking about values and we've been talking about activists and we've primarily used the example of slavery abolition here. But what about technology? And what about technologists? New technologies can create plasticity that didn't exist or create opportunities that didn't exist before. What is the long-termist approach to being a technologist?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  So yes, exactly, there are two things. One is that new technologies gives this enormous moment of plasticity because what you need to like regulate and have norms around the technology. So what should the regulations and norms around artificial intelligence be as it gets like more and more powerful? What should the norms and regulations be around being able to make new pathogens in labs, given technology like this podcast nine and other gene editing technology? So one thing that is at least, you know, distinctive about the community of people that I would call the kind of long-termist community is that there's a lot of kind of horizon scanning for like, okay, what the, what the areas of technology

• 48:35Speaker 01

  that are making very rapid progress, where AI and biotech are the two most obvious ones, that really could be transformative, even if the most powerful technology is not yet here, but will be in kind of five, 10 years. And then in advance, trying to prepare, say, thinking through like, okay, what does a good regulator of the environment look like? What are the social norms we should have about this? And then finally, what other technology that maybe we should be trying to bring forward in order to protect against some of the risks? So this is a concept called differential technological progress, where some sorts of technology, like vaccines are defensive, or masks are defensive against pathogens,

• 49:18Speaker 01

  or this far UVC lighting that I talk about that could make a room like safe from airborne pathogens. But others, such as the ability to make viruses more deadly or more transversal, or even to make viruses essentially de novo, that is at least dual use and has the ability to, you know, create new pathogens of unprecedented destructive power. And so, yeah, the kind of two attitudes I think would be like, think about regulation and social norms well ahead of time. And then secondly, like wherever possible, try and advance safer technology, defensive technology. And if it's possible, though often that's extremely hard, is yeah,

• 49:59Speaker 01

  slow or minimize the development of more technology that like at least poses like very significant risks.

• 50:08Ezra Klein?

  It's been my observation that it is more common for people to have a thought through agenda for values change, for political change, for the programs they would like to see emerge, the transfers and subsidies they would like to see happen than for technological change. So I'm curious, from your long-termist, moral philosopher perspective, what are the technologies you would like to see focused on?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  The two technologies by far are artificial intelligence, where things are moving very quickly. I don't know yet, anyone listening, if you just check out some of the latest models, they're incredibly impressive. So one model, for example, it's a language model. You can give it a puzzle, like, my grandmother was in hospital and I felt a certain color. Then I got caught up in traffic and I felt another color. If you take those two colors and put them together, like merge them, what color would you get? And the language model will say, well, if your grandmother was in hospital, you would feel a sad color, like blue. And

• 51:25Speaker 01

  if you got caught up in traffic, you would feel an angry color, like red. When you combine blue and red, you get purple. So the answer is purple. So we're starting to see these models that are engaging in something that looks a lot like, kind of quite impressive, in fact, kind of human reasoning. Obviously, it's still a very early stage, but the progress is dramatic. They're also able to do proofs at a reasonably high level. And they're also showing evidence of generality. So not just one model, Gator, was not just able to do a single task, but able to do very many tasks. And this is going to have just an enormous array of implications, some of varying degrees of familiarity. They could be very potent

• 52:08Speaker 01

  at interdencing power among elites. But then it also means that we might get to the stage where we develop artificial systems that are as powerful, or much greater, much more powerful than human beings, more capable across a wide variety of domains, where if you survey experts on this... They are thinking like this is going to occur with really quite significant probability over the coming few decades. That's something we should be really prepared for, in particular because on kind of leading economic models, it really follows quite naturally that you should expect much faster rates of technological progress as a result.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Basically, once you get to the point where AI systems can automate innovation, including innovation about AI systems themselves, then things could start really happening very quickly. And so what we might think of as things that would be designed only after centuries and centuries of progress, we could actually get like within decades.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  At the limit, then, we could even lose control of AI systems to the AI systems themselves. The argument being that, well, the reason humans are so powerful on the planet, so ecologically dominant, is because of our collective intelligence, and that's something that could be surpassed by AI systems themselves. Now, these are just gigantic problems and gigantic issues that we're facing, and that requires foresight, both in terms of the technical side, so ensuring that AI systems do what we want them to do, ensuring that even if we did have AI systems that were far more intellectually capable than us, nonetheless, we would still kind of be in control.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  And then, secondly, having foresight about kind of regulation here, where how do we ensure that these technologies don't get used to intense power? How do we ensure that we're like safely navigating what might be kind of one of the most important technological transitions in history?

• 54:18Ezra Klein?

  I think somebody listening to this would note that various technologies have come up a number of times here, AI in particular, but also biotechnologies, nuclear weapons, and primarily negatively that we have invented or we are inventing a bunch of technologies that you seem to think pose a quite profound risk to our future.

• 54:45Ezra Klein?

  And a reasonable question might be, is the long-term view that we should stop? That we don't understand the stuff well enough? We shouldn't be putting our long-term future at risk? When there is uncertainty, we should err on the side of caution. My sense is that's not your view, that you're actually quite worried about technological stagnation. But, but talk through that tension here, because technology comes up a lot for you, but not very positively.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Sure, I mean, the thing I should say is like, if you ask me, in general, what do I think about technology, then I'm enormously pro. I mean, if we look to the last 300 years, like, people's quality of life has increased enormously. Like, I don't need to suffer pain during surgery. I don't die of kind of syphilis, or tuberculosis, or typhus. I may be able to kind of travel quite widely. Like, there's just enormous benefits from technology. And I expect in the future there to be enormous benefits again. But you're right, like, technology is a double-edged sword. Look at the power to split the atom. It gave us both nuclear power, which is enormously beneficial, and the bomb,

• 55:58Speaker 01

  which is like, a very scary development. So, I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that we do want to delay the dangerous technology, or at least slow the point at which we get it, until we are adequately prepared. And the big worry is like, is this feasible at all? Where if the most responsible countries say, oh, we're not going to do certain technology, and then the kind of irresponsible ones face ahead, you might have like, made things worse. And the idea of like, globally kind of slowing the development of a particular technology, that could be like, you know, very hard. However, it does happen. Like, we have the technological power to clone people, for example.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  You know, we've already cloned monkeys, we could clone human beings. That has not happened, and I don't actually expect it to happen anytime soon. That's not a technological hurdle, that's a matter of kind of global social norms. So for some technologies, I think we could slow them. If we're slowing kind of growth in general, I do start to get more hesitant. So in chapter seven of What We Are the Future, I talk about stagnation. The idea that maybe growth wouldn't just slow, but actually even come to a halt. And there is a reason for thinking that that might well happen within something like 100 years. And I actually think that would be quite a scary thing, because I think the given the level of technological progress that we have at the moment is not sustainable.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  So if we think about, imagine if we stagnated at 1920s level of technology. The only way we could have supported society is by burning coal and other fossil fuels. We didn't have any alternatives. So eventually, we would have just run out of fossil fuels. We wouldn't have been able to continue, and we would have utter climate catastrophe, like worst possible case, climate catastrophe on our hands. In the future, if we have dangerous technologies, I mean, we already have them now with nuclear weapons, but we will quite potentially be able to develop extremely powerful bioweapons. Well, then we'll be at this period of kind of heightened risk. And if we're able to move through that period and get out on the other side, hopefully safely,

• 58:10Speaker 01

  then we've kind of navigated this unsustainable state. Whereas if we stagnate and we have a technology that could destroy us all, then over the long run, it becomes very, very likely indeed that we will, in fact, destroy everyone. And so that's why we need to take this kind of nuanced approach to technology and growth. Where in the long run, it's just very important that we maintain the engine of technological progress. But the most risky technologies, if we can like push them into the future a little bit at least, and ensure that we're like appropriately handling them, and we'll kind of handle them in a wiser way, then that would seem pretty good.

• 58:52Ezra Klein?

  How do you think about biodiversity loss and the broader extinction crisis from a long-termist perspective?

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is something where I think there's a relatively, you know, the long-termist perspective makes biodiversity loss, you know, much greater in importance. It's something that's irrevocable. So, long-termists typically talk about, you know, extinction of humanity as, you know, it's lasts forever because if humans go extinct, they can't come back. And that's true for other sorts of extinctions, too. So I wrote the book during the pandemic and I had these kind of, I sometimes went down very long rabbit holes, one of which was about the Quaternary Megafauna extinction. The fact that human beings seem to cause the extinction of a very large number of Megafauna, like about 10,000 years ago.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  And we would have had a much wider diversity of incredible animals. Glyptodonts, which were these like car-sized armadillos, or Megatherium, which is this ground sloth that weighed like four tons, you know. We could have had them kind of roaming the planet, but they went extinct. And my leading of the evidence is that humans were the kind of most important culprit. And so the loss of some species today is not just the loss from, you know, the next few generations, but that's actually something that like all people in the future would not be able to benefit from or value. And so I think it does just increase the value of this quite significantly.

• 1:00:29Ezra Klein?

  If you're wrong about something big, either in the long-term framework or just in your moral philosophy, what do you think it's most likely to be?

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  The thing that I still kind of feel most confused about or would feel least surprised about having completely changed my mind in 10 years is probably AI, where it's just a particularly complex issue. So if you take kind of the risk of biotechnology,

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  In a sense, it's quite simple. Viruses kill people. We might be able to develop the power to create viruses that could kill far more people. That's really bad. You know, that's like really pretty simple. I feel like I know what's going on there. Whereas with AI, it's more complex, not only on questions of like, when do we develop AI, but also just at the point in time that we have systems that are as powerful as human beings or even greater. What does that society even look like? Because in that society, we've had enormous kind of AI advances in the past. And then secondly, like, how exactly do we want to navigate that?

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Because it's not as simple as, you know, oh, we've just kind of, there's one framing, which is like, oh, we've got to like lock in human power, that would also kind of seem bad. Like, what I would want ideally is that AI could be used to further model progress, that like, you know, you can have these like AI philosophers and they help contribute to the kind of the conversation. And then also, there's just like so many ways it can go. Like, I worry about AI being helpful to individuals or countries or even companies with authoritarian impulses. I think like the set of actions that you might do, if you're particularly worried about that, is different than the set of actions you might do if you're solely focused on kind of AI takeover scenarios.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  And, you know, the list could kind of keep going on. Questions like, should we speed or slow AI progress? It's actually just like extremely difficult. And so, yeah, if you told me in kind of 10 years, I've got this like radically different perspective, I wouldn't really feel that surprised.

• 1:02:38Ezra Klein?

  Let me end here on the question of what somebody does with all of this. The future is big. You know, 80 trillion people try to reduce great power conflict or change AI or, you know, most people are just doing their best. What does it imply for just somebody listening, who maybe has a job or doesn't have their choice of all jobs in the world, or has kids and is busy? What does having a long-termist perspective mean for living a normal life?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  So having a long-termist perspective, I think it's very natural to think, wow, these are just huge issues. They are above my pay grade. Maybe governments should be tackling them, but it doesn't really impact what I as an individual can do. And I think that would be, you know, it's very natural. I think it's incorrect. I actually think like, anyone listening to this podcast can make an enormous difference. And an enormous difference, not just on the present generation, but for all generations to come, for our grandkids and their grandkids. And I think that's in two main ways. So one way is by donating. So if there's someone who just, they want to stay in their career, they want to contribute, well, you can donate

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  to highly effective nonprofits. Like, you know, you can find some examples at the EA, what the Effective Altruism Funds, including ones that are targeted on benefiting the long-term future, within areas that include AI and biotech, as well as kind of climate change charities. And so one thing I would particularly recommend is the Giving What We Can pledge. This is an organization I co-founded that encourages people to give at least 10% of their income to the causes they believe will do the most good. And I know that you, Ezra, recently took the 10% pledge. And so I'm very happy and thankful that you've done this.

• 1:04:32Ezra Klein?

  I am a signatory.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Ezra Klein?

  I always think of it too. I think it's a funny, not a rebranding, because I think it's great. And as you said, I'm part of it. But this goes way back. I used to do this long before it was called Giving What We Can. It was tithing, right? And it's a deep tradition in many religions.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely. There's a reason we chose 10% as the figure to aim for when making your donations, which is that if people say, oh, that seems a lot, seems like too much. Well, one thought is like, look, people much poorer than us have been doing this for thousands of years. And so, yeah, I think, you know, maybe if you're listening to this, you don't believe in God, you're not religious. Well, that doesn't mean you shouldn't still be trying to live a kind of fully ethical life. And I would love it to be a norm where donating 10% of your income to effective nonprofits, that's just part of living a good life.

• 1:05:27Ezra Klein?

  And now, always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  So, three books I'd recommend. The first is Moral Capital by Christopher Leslie Brown, which I mentioned earlier. It's just the single best book that I know of on interpretation of the abolitionist campaign for the end of slavery. And he argues quite forcefully in favor of the argument that it really was an event that could have gone either way. Second is The Precipice by my colleague Toby Ord. I certainly couldn't not mention it. I really see what we are the future as like a complement, like a sister book to The Precipice, which details in incredible detail the existential risks that we face, including from bio and AI and great power war. And then the final book I'd recommend

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  is The Scout Mindset by Julia Gaylord, which is just a wonderful book for expressing a kind of mode of reasoning that really resonates with me, which is rather than soldier mindset, where you have a particular point of view and you're trying to marshal all of your arguments in defense of it. Instead, you're just trying to explore and you're trying to figure out like, what does the landscape look like? What is true? And be kind of cautious and questioning about your own kind of point of view. And that's, you know, I don't know if I always achieve that, but it's something I try to aspire towards.

• 1:06:53Ezra Klein?

  Will MacAskill, thank you very much.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:07:07Ezra Klein?

  So that's my conversation with Will MacAskill. I'm going to start trying to use the outro's here to offer a few recommendations for where you can follow up or hear challenges or go deeper on the ideas in these episodes. I want to try and do a better job of connecting the various explorations we do on the show to one another. So AI risk came up a lot in this conversation. I decided not to go too deep into it here. But if you do want to dig deeper into it, you should check out my conversation with Brian Christian, author of the really great book on this subject, The Alignment Problem. If you want to hear more about effective altruism and why this moment might be an unusual hinge in human history, my conversation with Holden Karnofsky is a great place to start. And if you want an alternative perspective, particularly on the relationship human beings should have to the natural world,

• 1:07:52Ezra Klein?

  the novelist Richard Powers is really worth listening to. I loved that conversation, and it is one worth holding in tension with these others. We're going to put links to all of these in the show description. And as always, you can support the show by sending this episode to a friend, or if you hated it, an enemy, or leaving us a review in whatever podcast app you're using right now. The Yes or No Show is produced by Andy Galvin and Roja Karma, fact checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Sonia Herrera and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lynn and Christina Samueluski.