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Quote by Toby Ord

“If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Humanity is about two hundred thousand years old. But the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions more—enough time for millions of future generations; enough to end disease, poverty and injustice forever; enough to create heights of flourishing unimaginable today. And if we could learn to reach out further into the cosmos, we could have more time yet: trillions of years, to explore billions of worlds. Such a lifespan places humanity in its earliest infancy. A vast and extraordinary adulthood awaits.”

Quote by Toby Ord

Work

The Precipice

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Author

Toby Ord
Toby Ord

Toby Ord is an influential scholar in the fields of artificial intelligence and ethics. Born on July 18, 1979, he is primarily dedicated to researching the potential risks and ethical issues of artificial intelligence. more

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“But there is a huge difference between, on one hand, admitting that there are severe difficulties, and, on the other, throwing our hands in the air and fatalistically declaring the problem to be unsolvable. We don't know that they are in solvable until we tried, and tried really hard. Given the magnitude of what's at stake, just giving up on the problem is in my opinion unacceptable. The extent to which we are currently neglecting the problem is shocking. Nick Bostrom, in a recent paper, illustrates this with a diagram showing how the number of academic publications on snowboarding outnumbers those on risks of human extinction by a factor of 20 or so, while those on dung beetles beat those on snowboarding by another factor of 2. This should not be taken as a suggestion that too much effort is spent on academic studies of snowboarding and dung beetles, but rather as an indication that current efforts into the study of existential risks to humanity could easily be significantly scaled up without major destruction to the current academic landscape as a whole.”

“If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it, because the action is so fast and irrevocable that we have not the data to intervene before the action is complete, then we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire and not merely a colorful imitation of it.”