William MacAskill

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
by Adam Becker
Published 14 Jun 2025

MacAskill, at least in his later writing, says that one shouldn’t take a job that is actively harmful, but he also claims that the harm inflicted by most lucrative jobs (e.g., a job in finance) is vastly outweighed by the good that could be done in the world if most of one’s salary from such a job were donated to worthy causes. 2 Adam Fisher, “Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex—and Maybe You Should Too,” Sequoia Capital, September 22, 2022, archived October 27, 2022, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/; Nicholas Kulish, “How a Scottish Moral Philosopher Got Elon Musk’s Number,” New York Times, October 8, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/business/effective-altruism-elon-musk.html; Zeke Faux, Number Go Up (New York: Currency Books, 2023), 83; Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism,” New Yorker, August 8, 2022, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/the-reluctant-prophet-of-effective-altruism. 3 William MacAskill (@willmacaskill), Twitter, November 11, 2022, https://twitter.com/willmacaskill/status/1591218022362284034. 4 Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): 229–243, www.jstor.org/stable/2265052; Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save (New York: Random House, 2009), 18. 5 Peter Singer, “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle,” New Internationalist, April 5, 1997, https://newint.org/features/1997/04/05/peter-singer-drowning-child-new-internationalist. 6 Robert Wiblin, “Most People Report Believing It’s Incredibly Cheap to Save Lives in the Developing World,” 80,000 Hours, May 9, 2017, https://80000hours.org/2017/05/most-people-report-believing-its-incredibly-cheap-to-save-lives-in-the-developing-world/; GiveWell, “How We Produce Impact Estimates,” last modified February 2024, www.givewell.org/impact-estimates#Impact_metrics_for_grants_to_GiveWells_top_charities. 7 Thomas Hurka, “Moral Demands and Permissions/Prerogatives,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-demands-permissions/; Travis Timmerman, “Sometimes There Is Nothing Wrong with Letting a Child Drown,” Analysis 75, no. 2 (2015): 204–212, www.jstor.org/stable/24671242. 8 Lewis-Kraus, “Reluctant Prophet.” 9 Rob Mather, “Against Malaria Foundation: What We Do, How We Do It, and the Challenges,” Effective Altruism, accessed June 12, 2024, www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/ea-global-2018-amf-rob-mather. 10 Lewis-Kraus, “Reluctant Prophet.” 11 “About Us: What Do We Do, and How Can We Help?,” 80,000 Hours, accessed June 12, 2024, https://80000hours.org/about/. 12 William MacAskill, “About William MacAskill,” accessed June 12, 2024, www.williammacaskill.com/press. 13 Naina Bajekal, “Want to Do More Good? This Movement Might Have the Answer,” Time, August 10, 2022, https://time.com/6204627/effective-altruism-longtermism-william-macaskill-interview/. 14 “History,” Centre for Effective Altruism, accessed June 12, 2024, www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/history; “Oxford-Based Charity Receives More Than $2.5 Billion in Pledges from ‘Community of Effective Givers,’” news release, University of Oxford, March 1, 2022, www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-03-01-oxford-based-charity-receives-more-25-billion-pledges-community-effective-givers. 15 William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (New York: Basic Books, 2022), 9. 16 Ibid., 5. 17 Ibid., 10. 18 Ibid., 13. 19 Ibid., 5, 27–28. 20 This calculation assumes that the mean lifespan over that time is one hundred years and actually uses a population figure of ten billion, just to make the math easier.

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Note that in the next tweets in the thread, MacAskill cites himself and two other prominent longtermists (Toby Ord and Holden Karnofsky) saying things to this effect. 50 Elon Musk (@elonmusk), Twitter (now X), August 1, 2022, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1554335028313718784. 51 Marisa Taylor, “At SpaceX, Worker Injuries Soar in Elon Musk’s Rush to Mars,” Reuters, November 10, 2023, www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety/. 52 Leonard David, “Jeff Bezos’ Vision: ‘A Trillion Humans in the Solar System,’” Space.com, July 21, 2017, www.space.com/37572-jeff-bezos-trillion-people-solar-system.html. 53 Eliezer Yudkowsky (@ESYudkowsky), Twitter (now X), December 31, 2018, https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1079644135907151872. 54 Dylan Matthews, “You Have 80,000 Hours in Your Career. Here’s How to Do the Most Good with Them,” Vox, August 3, 2015, www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9067641/william-macaskill-effective-altruism. 55 William MacAskill, “Replaceability, Career Choice, and Making a Difference,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (2014): 269–283, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9433-4. 56 William MacAskill, personal communication. 57 “Sam Bankman-Fried,” 80,000 Hours, archived June 13, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20210613111013/https://80000hours.org/stories/sam-bankman-fried/. 58 Fisher, “Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex.” 59 Reed Albergotti and Liz Hoffman, “Charity-Linked Money Launched Sam Bankman-Fried’s Empire,” Semafor, December 8, 2022, www.semafor.com/article/12/07/2022/charity-money-launched-sam-bankman-frieds-empire. 60 White House, “FACT SHEET: Climate and Energy Implications of Crypto-Assets in the United States,” news release, September 8, 2022, www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/09/08/fact-sheet-climate-and-energy-implications-of-crypto-assets-in-the-united-states/; Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser, “CO2 and Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” database, Our World in Data, accessed March 27, 2023, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions. 61 “Crypto Firm FTX Trading’s Valuation Rises to $18 bln After $900 mln Investment,” Reuters, July 20, 2021, www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-firm-ftx-trading-raises-900-mln-18-bln-valuation-2021-07-20/. 62 Bill Chappell, David Gura, and Lisa Lambert, “Bankman-Fried Is Arrested as Feds Charge Massive Fraud at FTX Crypto Exchange,” NPR, December 13, 2022, www.npr.org/2022/12/12/1142361088/bankman-fried-ceo-ftx-crypto-exchange-arrested-bahamas-charges-sdny; David Gura, “Sam Bankman-Fried Is Found Guilty of All Charges in FTX’s Spectacular Collapse,” NPR, November 2, 2023, www.npr.org/2023/11/02/1210100678/sam-bankman-fried-trial-verdict-ftx-crypto; Rafael Nam, “Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison for His FTX Crimes,” NPR, March 28, 2024, www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241210300/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-sentencing-crimes-crypto-mogul-greed. 63 Zachary Robinson, “EV Updates: FTX Settlement and the Future of EV,” Effective Altruism Forum, December 13, 2023, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HjsfHwqasyQMWRzZN/ev-updates-ftx-settlement-and-the-future-of-ev. 64 “Who We Are,” Future Fund, archived November 9, 2022, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20221109230958/https://ftxfuturefund.org/about/; “Our Grants and Investments,” Future Fund, archived November 9, 2022, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20221109231205/https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-grants/. 65 “Support Future Perfect,” Vox, August 18, 2022, www.vox.com/2020/1/7/21020439/support-future-perfect; Katie Clinebell, “By Returning $10M, Semafor Becomes the Latest Media Outlet Distancing Itself from SBF,” Investopedia, January 18, 2023, www.investopedia.com/media-outlets-are-returning-sam-bankman-fried-s-funds-7096408; “ProPublica Returns Grant Funded by Bankman-Fried Family,” ProPublica, February 28, 2022, updated December 20, 2022, www.propublica.org/atpropublica/bankman-fried-family-donates-5-million-to-propublica. 66 Dylan Matthews, “How Effective Altruism Let Sam Bankman-Fried Happen,” Vox, December 12, 2022, www.vox.com/future-perfect/23500014/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-ftx-crypto. 67 Jennifer Szalai, “How Sam Bankman-Fried Put Effective Altruism on the Defensive,” New York Times, December 9, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/12/09/books/review/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-crypto.html; Annie Lowrey, “Effective Altruism Committed the Sin It Was Supposed to Correct,” The Atlantic, November 17, 2022, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-ftx-sam-bankman-fried/672149/; Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism, and the Question of Complicity,” New Yorker, December 1, 2022, www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-and-the-question-of-complicity; Nitasha Tiku, “The Do-Gooder Movement That Shielded Sam Bankman-Fried from Scrutiny,” Washington Post, November 17, 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/17/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-ftx-crypto/; Eric Levitz, “Is Effective Altruism to Blame for Sam Bankman-Fried?

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28 “Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers,” New York Times, September 18, 2022, www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/2022/09/18/hardcover-nonfiction/. 29 Blurb appears on the Amazon page for What We Owe the Future: “What We Owe the Future,” Amazon, accessed March 24, 2023, www.amazon.com/What-Owe-Future-William-MacAskill/dp/1541618629. 30 Mixed and negative reviews: Regina Rini, “An Effective Altruist?,” Times Literary Supplement, September 9, 2022, www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/what-we-owe-the-future-william-macaskill-book-review-regina-rini/; Émile P. Torres, “Understanding ‘Longtermism’: Why This Suddenly Influential Philosophy Is So Toxic,” Salon, August 20, 2022, www.salon.com/2022/08/20/understanding-longtermism-why-this-suddenly-influential-philosophy-is-so/; Barton Swaim, “‘What We Owe the Future’ Review: A Technocrat’s Tomorrow,” Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/what-we-owe-the-future-review-a-technocrats-tomorrow-11661544593; Kieran Setiya, “The New Moral Mathematics,” Boston Review, August 15, 2022, www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-new-moral-mathematics/.

Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
by Bregman, Rutger
Published 9 Mar 2025

He figured he’d need about one-third of that to live a comfortable life, so he’d have 1 million pounds to donate. But Toby Ord understood that he would make a still greater difference if he could persuade others to do the same. Someone recommended he meet an ambitious philosophy student by the name of William MacAskill.19 MacAskill was also a big fan of Singer’s and equally frustrated with all those philosophers who did nothing with their high-minded ideas. He’d just spent the summer raising money for charity. The young men met at a cemetery – no joke – and ended up talking for hours and hours. They set up their first nonprofit soon after, based on a new idea they would dub effective altruism, or EA.

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And it’s true that one of the first effective altruists, when she was younger, even felt guilty going out for ice cream on occasion. When her father expressed worry that this lifestyle wasn’t going to make her happy, she fired back in all seriousness: ‘My happiness is not the point.’30 But Toby Ord and William MacAskill preferred to tell another tale to motivate others. They spoke of opportunities instead of obligations. Imagine for a moment that you save a kid from a burning building. Wouldn’t that be one of the best days of your life? And if so, then isn’t it fantastic that you – an ordinary person – can save as many lives as James Bond on one of his better days?

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We now know those efforts saved over 25 million lives, in part because they caused the price of HIV drugs to drop dramatically.33 What also bothered me about those effective altruists was that some went into finance so they could donate as much money as possible (‘earning to give’, they called it). This was right after the 2008 crash, when banks were being propped up using hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars. At the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, William MacAskill even managed to give a talk at Oxford titled ‘Want an ethical career? Become a banker.’ Okay, I thought, so you guys want to steal from the poor to give to the poorest? And you think that after a few years on Wall Street you’ll still want what’s best for the world? In 2012, MacAskill gave a presentation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Growth: A Reckoning
by Daniel Susskind
Published 16 Apr 2024

And in the economy as a whole, improvements like this are thought to have been responsible for almost 20 per cent of the increase in productivity during that half-century.60 Far More Technology The final thing we can do to discover more ideas is likely to be the most consequential in the longer term – but it is also the one that tends to get neglected. Consider the work of the philosopher William MacAskill. In his influential book What We Owe the Future, he recognizes the importance of new ideas in driving growth, and considers how we might discover more: either ‘increase the share of the population that is devoted to research’ or ‘increase the total size of the labour force’.61 This is the same sort of argument I made above.

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In part, this notoriety is due to the high-profile figures in Silicon Valley who count themselves as members of the long-termist movement. (Elon Musk, for instance, called it ‘a close match for my philosophy’).12 But it is also due to the stewardship of one of its standard-bearers, the philosopher William MacAskill, whose views on the limits to growth I explored in Chapter 8. MacAskill is also known for heading up another increasingly popular movement, ‘effective altruism’ (alongside philosophers such as Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord, among others). This is not a coincidence. The two movements are closely related.

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 58 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, ‘The Voiceless’ (1858), www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/owh/vless.html. 59 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1890), Book IV, Chapter IV, Section 2, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28747/28747-h/28747-h.htm. 60 Chang-Tai Hsieh, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones and Peter J. Klenow, ‘The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Economic Growth’, Econometrica, 87:5 (2019), 1439–74, quoted in C. I. Jones, ‘The Facts of Economic Growth’, in Handbook of Macroeconomics, Vol 2A., ed. John B. Taylor and Harald Unlig (Elsevier, 2016), p. 21. 61 William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (London: Oneworld, 2022), p. 152. 62 MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, p. 153. 63 MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, pp. 153 and 155. 64 This case is from Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb, ‘Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?’, American Economic Review, 110:4 (2020), 1104–44. 65 Daniel Susskind and Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 156. 66 Derek Lowe, ‘Eroom’s Law’, Science, 8 March 2012, www.science.org/content/blog-post/eroom-s-law; www.nature.com/articles/nrd3681. 67 Bloom et al., ‘Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?’

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
by William MacAskill
Published 27 Jul 2015

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
Published 31 Aug 2022

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
Published 14 Oct 2018

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.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT called “rule utilitarianism”: Stephen Nathanson, “Utilitarianism, Act and Rule,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu/util-a-r. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT even their planet: Tyler Cowen and Will MacAskill, “William MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Moral Progress, and Cultural Innovation (Ep. 156),” Conversations with Tyler, July 7, 2018, conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/william-macaskill. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “gathering of forecasting nerds”: Manifest 2023, 2023, manifestconference.net. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT will irrecoverably collapse: Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Kindle ed.

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Food, nytimes.com/2021/09/28/dining/eleven-madison-park-restaurant-review-plant-based.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT off about $30,000: Nanina Bajekal, “Inside the Growing Movement to Do the Most Good Possible,” Time, August 10, 2022, time.com/6204627/effective-altruism-longtermism-william-macaskill-interview. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT hosted by Sam Bankman-Fried: SBF was described as the host in the invitation that MacAskill emailed to me. When I later asked SBF about the choice of venue, he told me he didn’t know who had selected it, which I took to mean that someone else on his staff had.

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Kip Viscusi and Joseph E. Aldy, “The Value of a Statistical Life: A Critical Review of Market Estimates Throughout the World,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 27, no. 1 (2003): 5–76, doi.org/10.1023/A:1025598106257. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Definition of Effective Altruism”: William MacAskill, “The Definition of Effective Altruism,” in Effective Altruism, ed. Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 10–28, doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198841364.003.0001. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT rationalism originally referred: Peter Markie and M.

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
by Paul Jarvis
Published 1 Jan 2019

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.

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World
by Anupreeta Das
Published 12 Aug 2024

In a New York Times opinion piece, Buffett called out the emerging industry of “philanthropic colonialism,” where acts of giving by the wealthy in the name of upliftment and improvement in the quality of life only perpetuate the existence of an inherently unequal system. Rather than push for systemic change, Buffett wrote, causes like microlending and financial literacy only bring people into a cycle of debt, interest, and repayment.23 In later discussions, including with the philosopher-rabbi of the “effective altruism” movement, William MacAskill, Buffett appeared to be directly critiquing the “data-driven” approach that was au courant in philanthropy, arguing for an approach that was based more on intuition than simply data. Additionally, the Gates Foundation has come in for criticism for its unquestioned belief in the power of technology to solve problems.

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Before his downfall, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was one of the more high-profile so-called effective altruists, talking about his philosophy often in public and using his philanthropic activities to build FTX’s reputation. The movement, which owes its origin to the philosopher Peter Singer, takes an unsentimental, utilitarian approach to charitable giving—essentially applying quantitative standards to subjective goals. Those ideas have been updated by William MacAskill, a thirtysomething Oxford-educated philosopher, who has become a rabbi to the tech crowd. Once again, the concepts aren’t that different substantively from what has driven Gates and his foundation. Neither is the lofty nature of ambition. Among the most high-profile practitioners of effective altruism are Dustin Moskovitz, a cofounder of Facebook and Asana, which builds task management software, and his wife, Cari Tuna, a former reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future
by Keach Hagey
Published 19 May 2025

More controversially—considering both the growing competition between DeepMind and OpenAI and the already obvious geopolitical implications for whichever country first achieved AGI—each person who signed the document promised that “the economic prosperity created by AI should be shared broadly” and “superintelligence should only be developed in the service of widely shared ethical ideals, and for the benefit of all humanity rather than one state or organization.”29 Among the later signers was William MacAskill, an Oxford philosopher widely credited with creating effective altruism. The EA movement emerged in the early 2010s, led by MacAskill and his fellow Oxford philosopher Toby Ord, who were inspired by the 1972 essay by utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer that argued that affluent people had a moral responsibility to spend as much of their wealth as possible—and far more than was considered normal—to relieve suffering in the developing world.

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“Guest Annie Altman—Writer, Podcaster and Comedian,” Sally Take Live podcast, March 20, 2020. 17.Sam Levin, “Peter Thiel Faces Silicon Valley Backlash After Pledging $1.25 Million to Trump,” The Guardian, October 17, 2016. 18.Nitasha Tiku, “Meet the Techies Trying to Create the Turbo Tax of Voting,” BuzzFeed News, September 8, 2016. 19.Sam Altman, “What I Heard from Trump Supporters,” Sam Altman blog, February 21, 2017. 20.Douglas MacMillan, Keach Hagey, Deepa Seetharaman, “Tech Luminary Peter Thiel Parts Ways with Silicon Valley,” The Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2018. 21.Chafkin, The Contrarian, 200. 22.Tess Townsend, “Sam Altman Wants to See a Techie Run for California Governor and Challenge Trump,” Vox, April 14, 2017. 23.Willie Brown, “The Man President Trump Fears Most,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 15, 2017. 24.William Turton, “A Silicon Valley Kingmaker Wants to Fix What Tech Did to California,” The Outline, August 7, 2017. 25.Vauhini Vara, “The Political Awakening of Silicon Valley,” The California Sunday Magazine, September 13, 2017. 26.Klint Finley, “Obama Wants the Government to Help Develop AI,” Wired, October 12, 2016. 27.“Tasha McCauley: Cool Robot Chick,” ChiTAG Blog, July 23, 2014. 28.Centre for Effective Altruism, “EA in Media, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Julia Galef, AJ Jacobs, and William MacAskill,” YouTube, November 7, 2017. 29.Future of Life Institute, “Asilomar AI Principles,” Future of Life Institute, January 2017. 30.Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately,” LessWrong, December 22, 2007. 31.Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism,” The New Yorker, August 8, 2002. 32.Megan O’Neil, “Wringing the Most Good Out of a Facebook Fortune,” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, December 1, 2015. 33.Open Philanthropy.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference
by Alice Ross
Published 19 Nov 2020

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
Published 24 Mar 2020

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
Published 1 Jan 2015

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
Published 20 Nov 2018

In recent years Singer has made efforts to popularize his view, e.g., The 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.

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
by Karen Hao
Published 19 May 2025

Core to the EA philosophy is a mathematical concept called “expected value.” The expected value of something is calculated by multiplying the probability that it will occur with its quantified positive or negative impact. It’s a tool that can lead to counterintuitive thinking. In a 2013 paper, EA cofounder William MacAskill, at the time a doctoral student who would become an Oxford philosophy professor, argued, based on this logic, that it was more altruistic in the long run to take a more morally ambiguous job to get rich and donate that money through optimized philanthropy than to commit to a life of working for a morally good charity.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Core to the EA philosophy: Émile P. Torres, “The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares,” Truthdig, June 15, 2023, truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In a 2013 paper: William MacAskill, “Replaceability, Career Choice, and Making a Difference,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (2013): 269–83, doi.org/10.1007/S10677-013-9433-4. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Under the logic: “What Is Effective Altruism?,” Effective Altruism Forum, accessed October 8, 2024, effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism.

The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future
by Tom Chivers
Published 12 Jun 2019

He doesn’t know, exactly, but ‘It should be clear that we would have to give away enough to ensure that the consumer society, dependent as it is on people spending on trivia rather than giving to famine relief, would slow down and perhaps disappear entirely.’ Thirty-eight years after Singer wrote his essay, a small group of academics in Oxford, led by Toby Ord and William MacAskill, a professor of moral philosophy (at one point, the youngest associate professor in the world; he’s still only 32), took Singer’s ideas and tried to turn them into something both more practical and more precise. In 2009 they founded a charity called Giving What We Can, dedicated to finding the most effective charities in the world and helping people donate to them.

Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
by Zoë Schiffer
Published 13 Feb 2024

“Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy,” he tweeted on March 25, in a post that was accompanied by an interactive poll. “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle? The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” More than two million accounts voted, with 70 percent saying no. Musk’s free speech poll piqued the interest of William MacAskill, a Scottish philosopher and architect of the effective altruism movement, which takes a utilitarian approach to philanthropy in an effort to maximize the benefit of every donation. “I’m not sure what’s on your mind, but my collaborator Sam Bankman-Fried has for a while been potentially interested in purchasing [Twitter] and then making it better for the world,” MacAskill said, referencing the billionaire wunderkind behind FTX, then the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency exchange.

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World
by Parmy Olson

Chapter 14: A Vague Sense of Doom Details about Open Philanthropy’s disclosure of its executive director being married to someone who worked at OpenAI comes from www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/openai-general-support/. Details of investments by FTX founders into Anthropic come from Pitchbook, a market research firm. Details on Open Philanthropy’s grants and funding come from www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/. Texts between William MacAskill and Elon Musk are sourced from court filings that were released as part of a pretrial discovery process in a legal battle between Musk and Twitter, dated September 28, 2022. Anderson, Mark. “Advice for CEOs Under Pressure from the Board to Use Generative AI.” Fast Company, October 31, 2023.

Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
by Ingrid Robeyns
Published 16 Jan 2024

On the claim that utilitarianism is overdemanding, see Garrett Cullety, The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), and Jørn Sønderholm, “World Poverty, Positive Duties, and the Overdemandingness Objection,” Philosophy, Politics and Economics 12:3 (2013), pp. 308–27. 22.  givingwhatwecan.org/blog/how-much-money-should-we-donate-to-charity. 23.  givingwhatwecan.org/pledge and William MacAskill, Andreas Mogensen, and Toby Ord, “Giving Isn’t Demanding,” in: Paul Woodruff (ed.), The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers’ Perspectives on Philanthropy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 178–203. 9. The Rich Will Benefit, Too   1.  cnbc.com/2020/01/22/davos-2020-patriotic-millionaires-letter-calls-for-higher-taxes-on-global-elite.html.   2.  

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

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 Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

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.

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth
by Robin Hanson
Published 31 Mar 2016

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
Published 11 Sep 2023

“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.