|
What We Owe The Future
''What We Owe the Future'' is a 2022 book by the Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill, an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. It advocates for effective altruism and the philosophy of longtermism, which MacAskill defines as "the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time." His argument is based on the premises that future people count, there could be many of them, and we can make their lives better. Summary Part one: The long view MacAskill makes the case for longtermism—an ethical stance which gives priority to improving the long-term future—and proposes that we can make the future better in two ways: "by averting Global catastrophic risk, permanent catastrophes, thereby ensuring civilisation's survival; or by changing civilisation's trajectory to make it better while it lasts ... Broadly, ensuring survival increases the quantity of future life; trajectory changes increase its qualit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William MacAskill
William David MacAskill (' Crouch; born 24 March 1987) is a Scottish philosopher and author, as well as one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He was a Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford, co-founded Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours, and is the author of '' Doing Good Better'' (2015) and '' What We Owe the Future'' (2022), and the co-author of ''Moral Uncertainty'' (2020). Early life and education MacAskill was born William Crouch in 1987 and grew up in Glasgow. He was educated at Hutchesons' Grammar School in Glasgow. At the age of 15, after learning about how many people were dying as a result of AIDS, he made the decision to work towards becoming wealthy and giving away half of his money. At the age of 18, MacAskill read Peter Singer's 1972 essay " Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which motivated his philosophical and charitable interests. MacAskill earned his BA in p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economic Stagnation
Economic stagnation is a prolonged period of slow economic growth (traditionally measured in terms of the GDP growth), usually accompanied by high unemployment. Under some definitions, ''slow'' means significantly slower than potential growth as estimated by macroeconomists, even though the growth rate may be nominally higher than in other countries not experiencing economic stagnation. Secular stagnation theory The term "secular stagnation" was originally coined by Alvin Hansen in 1938 to "describe what he feared was the fate of the American economy following the Great Depression of the early 1930s: a check to economic progress as investment opportunities were stunted by the closing of the frontier and the collapse of immigration". Warnings similar to secular stagnation theory have been issued after all deep recessions, but they usually turned out to be wrong because they underestimated the potential of existing technologies.Pagano and Sbracia (2014"The secular stagnation h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York Times''. Together with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann, they established the F-R Publishing Company and set up the magazine's first office in Manhattan. Ross remained the editor until his death in 1951, shaping the magazine's editorial tone and standards. ''The New Yorker''s fact-checking operation is widely recognized among journalists as one of its strengths. Although its reviews and events listings often focused on the Culture of New York City, cultural life of New York City, ''The New Yorker'' gained a reputation for publishing serious essays, long-form journalism, well-regarded fiction, and humor for a national and international audience, including work by writers such as Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alice Munro. In the late ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
80,000 Hours
80,000 Hours is a London-based nonprofit organisation that conducts research on which careers have the largest positive social impact and provides career advice based on that research. The organisation's name refers to the typical amount of time someone spends working over a lifetime. The book ''80,000 Hours'' by Benjamin Todd features advice based on the philosophy of effective altruism plus personal fulfillment. The organisation has also hosted a podcast since 2017, featuring speakers from a variety of careers and perspectives on such philosophy, as well as a YouTube channel. Articles in the vein of the book and podcast have been posted regularly on the 80,000 Hours website since its founding, which also provides advice through one-on-one sessions. Principles According to 80,000 Hours, some careers aimed at doing good are far more effective than others. They evaluate problems people can focus on solving in terms of their "scale", "neglectedness", and "solvability", while ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial General Intelligence
Artificial general intelligence (AGI)—sometimes called human‑level intelligence AI—is a type of artificial intelligence that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks. Some researchers argue that state‑of‑the‑art large language models already exhibit early signs of AGI‑level capability, while others maintain that genuine AGI has not yet been achieved. AGI is conceptually distinct from artificial superintelligence (ASI), which would outperform the best human abilities across every domain by a wide margin. AGI is considered one of the definitions of Chinese room#Strong AI vs. AI research, strong AI. Unlike artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), whose competence is confined to well‑defined tasks, an AGI system can generalise knowledge, transfer skills between domains, and solve novel problems without task‑specific reprogramming. The concept does not, in principle, require the system to be an autonomous agent; a static model— ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Disaster Preparedness
Emergency management (also Disaster management) is a science and a system charged with creating the framework within which communities reduce vulnerability to hazards and cope with disasters. Emergency management, despite its name, does not actually focus on the management of emergencies; emergencies can be understood as minor events with limited impacts and are managed through the day-to-day functions of a community. Instead, emergency management focuses on the management of disasters, which are events that produce more impacts than a community can handle on its own. The management of disasters tends to require some combination of activity from individuals and households, organizations, local, and/or higher levels of government. Although many different terminologies exist globally, the activities of emergency management can be generally categorized into preparedness, response, mitigation, and recovery, although other terms such as disaster risk reduction and prevention are also co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pandemic
A pandemic ( ) is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has a sudden increase in cases and spreads across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. Widespread endemic (epidemiology), endemic diseases with a stable number of infected individuals such as recurrences of seasonal influenza are generally excluded as they occur simultaneously in large regions of the globe rather than being spread worldwide. Throughout human history, there have been a number of pandemics of diseases such as smallpox. The Black Death, caused by the Plague (disease), Plague, caused the deaths of up to half of the population of Europe in the 14th century. The term ''pandemic'' had not been used then, but was used for later epidemics, including the 1918 Influenza A virus subtype H1N1, H1N1 influenza A pandemic—more commonly known as the Spanish flu—which is the Deadliest pandemics in history, deadliest pandemic in history. The mos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biosecurity
Biosecurity refers to measures aimed at preventing the introduction or spread of harmful organisms (e.g. viruses, bacteria, plants, animals etc.) intentionally or unintentionally outside their native range or within new environments. In agriculture, these measures are aimed at protecting food crops and livestock from pest (organism), pests, invasive species, and other organisms not conducive to the welfare of the human population. The term includes Biological pest control, biological threats to people, including those from pandemic diseases and bioterrorism. The definition has sometimes been broadened to embrace other concepts, and it is used for different purposes in different contexts. The COVID-19 pandemic is a recent example of a threat for which biosecurity measures have been needed in all countries of the world. Background and terminology The term "biosecurity" has been defined differently by various disciplines. The term was first used by the agricultural and environmenta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Population Ethics
Population ethics is the philosophical study of the ethical problems arising when our actions affect ''who'' is born and ''how many'' people are born in the future. An important area within population ethics is population axiology, which is "the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, ''when the states of affairs in question may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live''." Moral philosopher Derek Parfit brought population ethics to the attention of the academic community as a modern branch of moral philosophy in his seminal work '' Reasons and Persons'' in 1984. Discussions of population ethics are thus a relatively recent development in the history of philosophy. Formulating a satisfactory theory of population ethics is regarded as "notoriously difficult". While scholars have proposed and debated many different population ethical theories, no consensus in the academic community has emerged. Gustaf Arrhenius ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nuclear Warfare
Nuclear warfare, also known as atomic warfare, is a War, military conflict or prepared Policy, political strategy that deploys nuclear weaponry. Nuclear weapons are Weapon of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction; in contrast to conventional warfare, nuclear warfare can produce destruction in a much shorter time and can have a long-lasting radiological warfare, radiological result. A major nuclear exchange would likely have long-term effects, primarily from the Nuclear fallout, fallout released, and could also lead to secondary effects, such as "nuclear winter", nuclear famine, and societal collapse. A global thermonuclear war with Cold War-era stockpiles, or even with the current smaller stockpiles, may lead to various scenarios including human extinction. To date, the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict occurred in 1945 with the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6, 1945, a uranium Nuclear weapon design, gun-type device (code name ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nuclear Winter
Nuclear winter is a severe and prolonged anti-greenhouse effect, global climatic cooling effect that is hypothesized to occur after widespread firestorms following a large-scale Nuclear warfare, nuclear war. The hypothesis is based on the fact that such fires can inject soot into the stratosphere, where it can block some Diffuse sky radiation, direct sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth. It is speculated that the resulting cooling would lead to widespread crop failure and Nuclear famine, famine. When developing computer models of nuclear-winter scenarios, researchers use the conventional bombing of Hamburg, and the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima firestorm in World War II as example cases where soot might have been injected into the stratosphere, alongside modern observations of natural, large-area wildfire-firestorms. General "Nuclear winter", or as it was initially termed, "nuclear twilight", began to be considered as a scientific concept in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fossil Fuel Depletion
A fossil fuel is a flammable carbon compound- or hydrocarbon-containing material formed naturally in the Earth's crust from the buried remains of prehistoric organisms (animals, plants or microplanktons), a process that occurs within geological formations. Reservoirs of such compound mixtures, such as coal, petroleum and natural gas, can be extracted and burnt as fuel for human consumption to provide energy for direct use (such as for cooking, heating or lighting), to power heat engines (such as steam or internal combustion engines) that can propel vehicles, or to generate electricity via steam turbine generators. Some fossil fuels are further refined into derivatives such as kerosene, gasoline and diesel, or converted into petrochemicals such as polyolefins (plastics), aromatics and synthetic resins. The origin of fossil fuels is the anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms. The conversion from these organic materials to high-carbon fossil fuels is typically the re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
