Peter Singer

As I said, there are other very wealthy people who are giving really effectively.

And I think the movement has recovered from that burst of bad media publicity and is still going strong.

Yes, there's quite a number of people in the effective altruism movement are interested in altruism.

preventing our species becoming extinct, including trying to reduce the risk that AI will take us over in some way.

I have mixed feelings about that.

I do think that what we've been talking about, global poverty, is certainly in a more immediate cause that we can, with greater certainty, know what we're doing and know that we can have good consequences.

I also think that animal welfare and especially trying to combat factory farming of animals which causes suffering on a vast scale is another very practical and immediate concern that we can know we're having good consequences.

Whereas trying to reduce the risk of extinction and especially the risk of extinction being caused by super intelligent AI is much more speculative that you're going to actually succeed.

But, of course, the counter-argument goes, well, we're not just talking about 8 billion people when we're talking about reducing the risk of extinction.

We're talking about vast numbers of people who will exist and possibly our species will colonize other planets and spread throughout the galaxy or even other galaxies eventually.

So, you know, you can talk about...

not just trillions, but quintillions or whatever of people who might exist and won't exist if, in fact, we don't survive the next century.

So, you know, I think there's a real point there.

I mean, I would value, especially as I've been saying, a utilitarian has to value...

Consciousness, pleasant consciousness, happiness.

And if you really think that there's a chance that there will be quintillions of happy beings having solved all the technological problems that we face, living in future centuries or millennia, that's something that would be tragic if that were lost.

So it's not obvious that they're wrong to think about extinction risk as a high priority, but I still think that it's very difficult to know how we are contributing to reducing that particular one.

Other extinction risks, by the way, like reducing the risk of bioterrorism or nuclear war, I do take much more seriously as things that we can actually have an impact on.

Yes, so we can distinguish here between what we would do if we were ideal beings, purely motivated by the utilitarian idea, from what we can reasonably ask of human beings to do, given the way they are and that they have evolved from thousands of generations of beings who survived because they thought about their own interests and those of their close kin.

so um if if we were all uh saints uh then yes we would give away down to that level of marginal utility if we by giving more but we're not so um i and and i think what we ought to be asking is what will actually bring about the best consequences so if we