> Robert Wiblin: Are there some approaches that you think are just obviously too broad? > Toby Ord: Good question. I think just saying, “Okay, what about impro

> Robert Wiblin: Are there some approaches that you think are just obviously too broad? > Toby Ord: Good question. I think just saying, “Okay, what about improving science?” my guess is that because this begets technology, which begets some of the risk, it’s unlikely that just pushing on that is a plausible thing to particularly help. > ... They probably wouldn’t even know about asteroid risk, or super volcano risk, or various other natural risks. I think talking about these kind of risks is a mistake. They're not the biggest thing on our plate and people will always be able to foresee them as too distant and too small. ~~~~~ > Robert Wiblin: We’ve talked a lot about reducing risks to the future. What about thinking about the opposite of that, which is extremely large upsides? Are there any practical ways that people might go about not so much preventing extinction or something horrible, but also trying to create something that’s much more positive than what we have reason to hope for? > Toby Ord: It’s a good question. I’m not sure. If you want a specific technology, work on electric transportation. Fossil fuel transportation in agriculture allowed us to scale up humanity to 7.5+ billion people, but it created a time-bomb because as soon as its too pricey to move food around, we can no longer create it as scale, and there's no going back to agrarian pastoral society without killing almost all the humans. Over the long term, we have a moral imperative to advance ourselves beyond fossil fuels for transportation. This is what I believe to be the most moral technology we could work on.[1] "Humanity has a bug. We think of the future too little, and too often we think technology propels itself, that the future will simply unfold automatically. Or worse, many seem to have suffered a loss of faith in any real vision of the future. I wish this was not so." [1] https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-technology-6413ca8449c9 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-technology-6413ca...