Longtermism: an idea that could save 100 billion trillion lives

Longtermism is the idea that because humanity’s future is potentially vast in size, we could have a massive altruistic impact by positively influencing it. In this video, we illustrate the papers “The Case for Strong Longtermism“ by Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill and “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development“ by Nick Bostrom (links below). We’ll examine two main ways in which we might most positively influence the far future: accelerating technological development and reducing existential risk, which is the risk of human extinction and of catastrophes so large that would curtail humanity’s potential forever. Advancing technological progress and preventing existential risk look much more compelling under a totalist view of population ethics, but they still look extremely important even under a person-affecting view. Clarification: Toby Ord estimates that the chance of an existential catastrophe (not just extinction) this century