William MacAskill

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Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, experimental subject, follow your passion, food miles, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nate Silver, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, William MacAskill, women in the workforce

Like laser eye surgery, this book will change how you look at the world forever.” —Uri Bram, bestselling author of Thinking Statistically “Inspiring, engrossing, and at times hilarious. I couldn’t put it down. This book will change your life.” —Nick Cooney, author of How to Be Great at Doing Good “William MacAskill shows that we can make a surprisingly large life-changing difference to those in disadvantaged parts of the world—provided that our altruistic impulses are intelligently channeled. This fascinating and clearly written book deserves wide readership: It can in itself do great good if its message is heeded.”

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Figuring out what really helps people is a challenging scientific puzzle, and these pages are full of unexpected twists—enlightening and invigorating.” —Joshua Greene, director of Harvard’s Moral Cognition Lab and author of Moral Tribes An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 Copyright © 2015 by William MacAskill Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.

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You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA MacAskill, William. Doing good better : how effective altruism can help you make a difference / William MacAskill. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-698-19110-5 1. Altruism. 2. Helping behavior. I. Title. HM1146.M33 2015 171'.8—dc23 2015000705 While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

A Oneworld Book First published in Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland and Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2022 This ebook edition published 2022 Published by arrangement with Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Copyright © William MacAskill 2022 The moral right of William MacAskill to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved Copyright under Berne Convention A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-86154-250-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-86154-482-0 (trade paperback) eISBN 978-0-86154-251-2 Oneworld Publications 10 Bloomsbury Street London WC1B 3SR England Stay up to date with the latest books, special offers, and exclusive content from Oneworld with our newsletter Sign up on our website oneworld-publications.com

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Also by William MacAskill Doing Good Better For my parents, Mair and Robin, and their parents, Ena and Tom and Daphne and Frank, and . . . Contents PART I. THE LONG VIEW Introduction Chapter 1: The Case for Longtermism Chapter 2: You Can Shape the Course of History PART II. TRAJECTORY CHANGES Chapter 3: Moral Change Chapter 4: Value Lock-In PART III. SAFEGUARDING CIVILISATION Chapter 5: Extinction Chapter 6: Collapse Chapter 7: Stagnation PART IV. ASSESSING THE END OF THE WORLD Chapter 8: Is It Good to Make Happy People? Chapter 9: Will the Future Be Good or Bad? PART V.

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See labour force World Values Survey, 196–197, 201 world war, potential for, 116 World War II the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 126–128 German goal of global domination, 92 Germany’s forced labour, 65 Hitler’s sadistic behaviour, 219 scenarios of ideological lock-in, 97–98 scenarios of moral evolution, 70 Yan, John, 239–240 Yemen: abolition of slavery, 69–70 Yglesias, Matt, 93 Afterwards A story of a good future. For Holly William MacAskill is an associate professor in philosophy and senior research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world. He has focused his research on moral uncertainty, effective altruism, and future generations.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

Academics, moreover, have the special opportunity to influence students. Polls show, unsurprisingly, that younger people, who expect to survive most of the century, are more engaged and anxious about long-term and global issues. Student involvement in, for instance, ‘effective altruism’ campaigns is burgeoning. William MacAskill’s book Doing Good Better8 is a compelling manifesto. It reminds us that urgent and meaningful improvements to people’s lives can be achieved by well-targeted redeployment of existing resources towards developing or destitute nations. Wealthy foundations have more traction (the archetype being the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has had a massive impact, especially on children’s health)—but even they cannot match the impact that national governments could have if there were pressure from their citizens.

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Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2005).   7.  Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch (New York: Penguin, 2015). Books such as this are educative. It’s surely regrettable that so many of us are ignorant of the basic technologies we depend on.   8.  William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference (New York: Random House, 2016).   9.  The Future of Man (1959). INDEX Africa: information technology in, 27, 28, 83, 84; Mo Ibrahim Prize for leadership in, 28–29; papal message resonating in, 34; population trends in, 30–31; solar energy in, 49 aging.

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

Newport believes that we need to be craftspeople, focused on getting better and better at how we use our skills, in order to be valuable to our company and its customers. The craftsperson mind-set keeps you focused on what you can offer the world; the passion mind-set focuses instead on what the world can offer you. Too many people assume that meaningful work or ideas are the result of passion. Research from William MacAskill of Oxford University has shown that engaging work helps you develop passion, not the other way around. This kind of work draws you in, holds your attention, and gives you a sense of flow (being absorbed in the work and losing track of time). Engaging work comprises four key components: clearly defined assignments, tasks you excel at, performance feedback, and work autonomy.

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Vallerand, “On the Psychology of Passion: In Search of What Makes People’s Lives Most Worth Living,” January 2007, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228347175_On_the_Psychology_of_Passion_In_Search_of_What_Makes_People’s_Lives_Most_Worth_Living. 82 following your passion is fundamentally flawed: Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012), xviii. engaging work helps you develop passion: William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference (New York: Avery, 2015), 147–178. 86 not be just a job but an adventure: Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and Elizabeth Fishel, “Is 30 the New 20 for Young Adults?” AARP, Washington, D.C., November 1, 2010, http://www.aarp.org/relationships/parenting/info-10-2010/emerging_adulthood_thirtysomethings.html. 86always winners: M.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

As divestment campaigns lead to heightened awareness of the need for polluting companies to take climate change more seriously, this can push them to make changes to their business models, for example by investing more in renewable energy or speeding up their transition away from fossil fuels. It can be argued that the real effect of a public campaign to divest comes through bad publicity – though this is harder to quantify. Writing in the New Yorker in 2015, Oxford philosophy professor William MacAskill concluded that divestment campaigns ‘have the potential to do good, but only with caveats. To avoid the risk of misleading people, those running campaigns should be clear that the aim of divestment is to signal disapproval of certain industries, not to directly affect share price.’ Michael Barry notes that when Georgetown made its announcement about divesting from fossil fuels in February 2020, the media response was huge.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

So in these other senses, our lives may matter more now, but these other senses are compatible with the kind of temporal neutrality I endorse. 25 This has been suggested by J. J. C. Smart (1984, pp. 64–5) and G. E. Moore (1903, § 93). 26 New generations will have new risks that they can help reduce, but only we can reduce the risks being posed now and in coming decades. 27 The name was coined by William MacAskill and myself. The ideas build on those of our colleagues Nick Beckstead (2013) and Nick Bostrom (2002b, 2003). MacAskill is currently working on a major book exploring these ideas. 28 We will see in Appendix E that as well as safeguarding humanity, there are other general ways our acts could have a sustained influence on the longterm future. 29 On a discount rate of 0.1% per annum (low by economists’ standards), the intervening million years make suffering in one million years more than 10434 times as important as the same amount of suffering in two million years. 30 One could cash this out in different ways depending on one’s theory of value.

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It is even possible to have situations where we might be best off with actions that pose their own immediate risk if they make up for it in how much they lower longterm risk. Potential examples include developing advanced artificial intelligence or centralizing control of global security. 7 The name was suggested by William MacAskill, who has also explored the need for such a process and how it might work. Nick Bostrom (2013, p. 24) expressed a closely related idea: “Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know—at least not in concrete detail—what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey.

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically by Peter Singer

Albert Einstein, clean water, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Flynn Effect, hedonic treadmill, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer: altruism, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, trolley problem, William MacAskill, young professional

On other occasions Ord has quoted the figure for preventing blindness. 7. Geoghegen, “Why I’m Giving £1m to Charity”; email from Toby Ord to the author, July 2014. By 2014 inflation had pushed the £18,000 back up to nearly £20,000. 8. http://www.givingwhatwecan.org (October 25, 2014). 9. http://80000hours.org/about-us. 10. William MacAskill, “The History of the Term ‘Effective Altruism,”’ March 10, 2014, http://www.effective-altruism.com/the-history-of-the-term-effective-altruism/. 11. http://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/AboutUs/ImpactReport.aspx. Chapter 3. Living Modestly to Give More 1. Julia Wise, “It Doesn’t Have to Be Hard,” March 11, 2013, http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/03/it-doesnt-have-to-be-hard.html. 2.

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich

bread and circuses, effective altruism, end world poverty, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jim Simons, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nick Bostrom, Pareto efficiency, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, supervolcano, time value of money, William MacAskill

., The 202 N OTE S Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2010); The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). For another philosopher’s defense of effective altruism, see William MacAskill, Doing Good Better (New York: Gotham Books, 2015). 13. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2000); Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999); Nancy Rosenblum and Robert Post, eds., Civil Society and Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Simone Chambers and Will Kymlicka, eds., Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Mark Warren, Democracy and Association (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Victor M.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

Galston, “Is Seeing Still Believing? The Deepfake Challenge to Truth in Politics,” Brookings, Jan. 8, 2020, www.brookings.edu/​research/​is-seeing-still-believing-the-deepfake-challenge-to-truth-in-politics. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT First discovered in China Figure taken from William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View (London: Oneworld, 2022), 112, who cites a variety of sources, although acknowledges none are certain about this number. See also H. C. Kung et al., “Influenza in China in 1977: Recurrence of Influenza Virus A Subtype H1N1,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 56, no. 6 (1978), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bullwho00443-0095.pdf.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Robert Muggah and Sameh Wahba, “How Reducing Inequality Will Make Our Cities Safer,” Sustainable Cities (blog), World Bank, March 2, 2022, https://blogs.worldbank.org/sustainablecities/how-reducing-inequality-will-make-our-cities-safer. 25. “Marcus Aurelius Quotes,” BrainyQuote, accessed September 18, 2022, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/marcus_aurelius_106264. 26. Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, in The Essential Thomas Paine, ed. John Dos Passos (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2008), 167. 27. William MacAskill, “Effective Altruism: Introduction,” Essays in Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2017): 1–5, https://doi.org/10.7710/1526-0569.1580. 28. “About GiveDirectly,” GiveDirectly, accessed September 18, 2022, https://www.givedirectly.org/about/. 29. “GiveDirectly,” GiveWell, accessed September 18, 2022, https://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly. 30.

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

Acknowledgments For their comments, I thank Paul Christiano, Peter Twieg, Katja Grace, Carl Shulman, Tyler Cowen, Fabio Rojas, Bonnie Hanson, Luke Muehlhauser, Nikola Danaylov, Bryan Caplan, Michael Abramowicz, Gaverick Matheny, Paul Crowley, Peter McCluskey, Sam Wilson, Chris Hibbert, Thomas Hanson, Daniel Houser, Kaj Sotala, Rong Rong, David Friedman, Michael LaTorra, Ben Goertzel, Steve Omohundro, David Levy, Jim Miller, Mike Halsall, Peggy Jackson, Jan-Erik Strasser, Robert Lecnik, Andrew Hanson, Shannon Friedman, Karl Mattingly, Ken Kittlitz, Teresa Hartnett, Giulio Prisco, David Pearce, Stephen Van Sickle, David Brin, Chris Yung, Adam Gurri, Matthew Graves, Dave Lindbergh, Scott Aaronson, Gary Drescher, Robert Koslover, Don Hanson, Michael Raimondi, William MacAskill, Eli Dourado, David McFadzean, Bruce Brewington, Marc Ringuette, Daniel Miessler, Keith Henson, Garett Jones, Alex Tabarrok, Lee Corbin, Norman Hardy, Charles Zheng, Stuart Armstrong, Vernor Vinge, Ted Goertzel, Mark Lillibridge, Michael Chwe, Olle Häggström, Jaan Tallinn, Joshua Fox, Chris Hallquist, Joshua Fox, Kevin Simler, Eric Falkenstein, Lotta Moberg, Ute Shaw, Matt Franklin, Nick Beckstead, Robyn Weaving, François Rideau, Eloise Rosen, Peter Voss, Scott Sumner, Phil Goetz, Robert Rush, Donald Prell, Olivia Gonzalez, Bradley Andrews, Keith Adams, Agustin Lebron, Karl Wiberg, Thomas Malone, Will Gordon, Philip Maymin, Henrik Jonsson, Mark Bahner, Adam Lapidus, Tom McKendree, Evelyn Mitchell, Jacek Stopa, Scott Leibrand, Paul Ralley, Anders Sandberg, Eli Lehrer, Michael Klein, Lumifer, Joy Buchanan, Miles Brundage, Harry Beck, Michael Price, Tim Freeman, Vladimir M., David Wolf, Randall Pickett, Zack Davis, Tom Bell, Harry Hawk, Adam Kolber, Dean Menk, Randall Mayes, Karen Maloney, Brian Tomasik, Ramez Naam, John Clark, Robert de Neufville, Richard Bruns, Keith Mansfield, Gordon Worley, Giedrius, Peter Garretson, Christopher Burger, Nithya Sambasivam, Zachary Weinersmith, Luke Somers, Barbara Belle, Jake Selinger, Geoffrey Miller, Arthur Breitman, Martin Wooster, Daniel Boese, Oge Nnadi, Joseph Mela, Diego Caleiro, Daniel Lemire, Emily Perry, Jess Riedel, Jon Perry, Eli Tyre, Daniel Erasmus, Emmanuel Saadia, Erik Brynjolfsson, Anamaria Berea, Niko Zinovii, Matthew Farrell, Diana Fleischman, and Douglas Barrett.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

“If you agree it’s important for a democracy, then I thought it was worth making an investment in it.” One person who was eager to be in the deal was Sam Bankman-Fried, the soon-to-be-disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who believed that Twitter could be rebuilt on the blockchain. He claimed to be a supporter of effective altruism, and the founder of that movement, William MacAskill, texted Musk to try to arrange a meeting. So did Michael Grimes, Musk’s primary banker at Morgan Stanley, who was working to put together the financing. “I’m backlogged with a mountain of critical work matters,” Musk texted Grimes. “ls this urgent?” Grimes replied that Bankman-Fried “would do the engineering for social media blockchain integration” and put $5 billion in the deal.