#138 – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter
What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the millennia, people have offered many answers: joy, justice, equality, accomplishment, loving god, wisd...
30 Sep 20222h 24min
#137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
Effective altruism, in a slogan, aims to 'do the most good.' Utilitarianism, in a slogan, says we should act to 'produce the greatest good for the greatest number.' It's clear enough why utilitarians ...
8 Sep 20222h 21min
#136 – Will MacAskill on what we owe the future
People who exist in the future deserve some degree of moral consideration.The future could be very big, very long, and/or very good.We can reasonably hope to influence whether people in the future exi...
15 Aug 20222h 54min
#135 – Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine
After a frenetic level of commentary during February and March, the war in Ukraine has faded into the background of our news coverage. But with the benefit of time we're in a much stronger position to...
8 Aug 202254min
#134 – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obe...
22 Jul 20223h 41min
#133 – Max Tegmark on how a 'put-up-or-shut-up' resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection
On January 1, 2015, physicist Max Tegmark gave up something most of us love to do: complain about things without ever trying to fix them. That “put up or shut up” New Year’s resolution led to the firs...
1 Jul 20222h 57min
#132 – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems
If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it's a fair bet that they don't want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where anyone can use it for free. This problem exists...
14 Jun 20222h 42min
#131 – Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world
“We’re leaving these 16 contestants on an island with nothing but what they can scavenge from an abandoned factory and apartment block. Over the next 365 days, they’ll try to rebuild as much of civili...
3 Jun 20221h 5min
