Toby Ord
Toby Ord is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, where his work is focused on existential risk. He founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge to donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities, and is a key figure in the effective altruism movement, which promotes using reason and evidence to help the lives of others as much as possible.
Books by Toby Ord
“It is making the case that there is a serious chance of an existential catastrophe in our lifetime, an event that would permanently foreclose on all of humanity’s future potential. Some such risks include the extinction of humanity by engineered pathogens or a takeover by a rogue AI or AI systems that have advanced to be more intelligent than humans but don’t share our goals. Also, more familiar events like asteroids, super volcanoes and so on. He gives us this amazingly detailed and balanced account of those different existential risks and what we can do about them. I think his case is fairly compelling.” Read more...
Will MacAskill, Nonprofit Leaders & Activist
Interviews with Toby Ord
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1
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
by David Christian -
2
Origins: How The Earth Made Us
by Lewis Dartnell -
3
The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity
by Fred Adams & Gregory Laughlin -
4
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
by Carl Sagan -
5
Diaspora
by Greg Egan
The best books on Big History, recommended by Toby Ord
The best books on Big History, recommended by Toby Ord
‘Big history’ looks at history on the timescale of the Earth and the universe, rather than just the short period of time that humanity has been around. Here, Toby Ord, a moral philosopher at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, recommends books to get a handle on it, and explains why now is a critical time for Homo sapiens.
Interviews where books by Toby Ord were recommended
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1
Moral Capital
by Christopher Leslie Brown -
2
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
by Julia Galef -
3
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord -
4
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Dan Gardner & Philip E Tetlock -
5
The Life You Can Save
by Peter Singer
The best books on Longtermism, recommended by Will MacAskill
The best books on Longtermism, recommended by Will MacAskill
There is so much suffering in today’s world it’s hard to focus attention on future generations, but that’s exactly what we should be doing, says Will MacAskill, a leader of the effective altruism movement. Here, he introduces books that contributed to his thinking about the long-term future and the “silent billions” who are not yet able to speak for themselves.
