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/