{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"80,000 Hours Podcast","title":"#112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":13720,"description":"Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to become a galaxy-spanning civilisation. \r\n\r\nBut the policy of US government agencies is already to spend up to $4 million to save the life of a citizen, making the death of all Americans a $1,300,000,000,000,000 disaster. \r\n\r\nAccording to Carl Shulman, research associate at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, that means you don’t need any fancy philosophical arguments about the value or size of the future to justify working to reduce existential risk — it passes a mundane cost-benefit analysis whether or not you place any value on the long-term future. \r\n\r\nLinks to learn more, summary and full transcript.\r\n\r\nThe key reason to make it a top priority is factual, not philosophical. That is, the risk of a disaster that kills billions of people alive today is alarmingly high, and it can be reduced at a reasonable cost. A back-of-the-envelope version of the argument runs: \r\n\r\n• The US government is willing to pay up to $4 million (depending on the agency) to save the life of an American. \r\n• So saving all US citizens at any given point in time would be worth $1,300 trillion. \r\n• If you believe that the risk of human extinction over the next century is something like one in six (as Toby Ord suggests is a reasonable figure in his book The Precipice), then it would be worth the US government spending up to $2.2 trillion to reduce that risk by just 1%, in terms of American lives saved alone. \r\n• Carl thinks it would cost a lot less than that to achieve a 1% risk reduction if the money were spent intelligently. So it easily passes a government cost-benefit test, with a very big benefit-to-cost ratio — likely over 1000:1 today. \r\n\r\nThis argument helped NASA get funding to scan the sky for any asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth, and it was directly promoted by famous economists like...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/VO1STE7hN95RRg9QdLo4soV2VhhbR9PF5ZZlRhDYcwE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzQxNDAyLzE2ODM1/NDQ1NDAtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}