In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with William MacAskill about his new book, What We Owe the Future. They discuss the philosophy of effective altruism (EA), longtermism, existential risk, criticism of EA, problems with expected-value reasoning, doing good vs feeling good, why it's hard to care about future people, how the future gives meaning to the present, why this moment in history is unusual, the pace of economic and technological growth, bad political incentives, value lock-in, the well-being of conscious creatures as the foundation of ethics, the risk of unaligned AI, how bad we are at predicting technological change, and other topics.
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#349 — Generosity, Cynicism, and the Future of Doing Good
#348 — The Politics of Antisemitism
#347 — Finding Sanity in 2024
#346 — The Best Kept Secret In History?
#345 — Resilience
#344 — The War in Gaza
#343 — What Is "Islamophobia"?
#342 — Animal Minds & Moral Truths
#341 — Gaza & Global Order
#340 — The Bright Line Between Good and Evil
#339 — The Infernal Logic of Jihad
#338 — The Sin of Moral Equivalence
#337 — The Future of Psychedelic Medicine
#336 — The Roots of Identity Politics
#335 — A Postmortem on My Response to Covid
#334 — The Low-Trust Society
#333 — Sanity Check on Climate Change
#332 — Can We Contain Artificial Intelligence?
#331 — A Golden Age for Assholes
#330 — The Doomsday Machine
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