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Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto: Is existential risk reduction a good use of resources?

WHEN: 19 March 2015 07:00:00PM (-0400)

WHERE: 1266 Queen Street West #6, Toronto, ON

Existential risks are threats to our future. Examples include nuclear war, some (possibly engineered) extremely lethal disease, and threats due to emerging technologies.

http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.html

The effective altruism movement is a friendly alliance containing those who see existential risk as a top priority together with those favouring more conventional causes such as poverty alleviation and animal rights.

The question to think about for this meeting is: is it sane and altruistic to try to reduce existential risk?

Sub-problems:

  • how morally relevant are the vast number of potential future generations?

  • which existential risks do we focus on?

  • how do we make existential risk reduction tractable?

  • in particular, how do we measure the risk of something that hasn't happened yet? How do we know we're reducing it?

  • overall, how does xrisk weigh against other areas of EA interest?

Also worth giving a shout-out to http://gcrinstitute.org/

Discussion article for the meetup : Toronto: Is existential risk reduction a good use of resources?

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