The single most disruptive technology over the course of the rest of my life, quite frankly, is artificial intelligence, machine learning.

We can't be entirely sure about just how much it's going to change with regards to culture,

society, the economy, how we work, how we live, but it's going to be a variable.

Now, most criticisms of AI, I think, tend to be very conservative. Some people just respond by

saying, it ain't happening. Well, guess what? It is. And it's high time we had a

conversation, really looking at the implications of an artificial general intelligence.

Even if you don't think that's certainly going to happen, you should be considering it,

because the likelihood is non-trivial. Could it mean that capitalism is moot? Will democracy as a

political system be able to manage it? Would it survive? Those are precisely the kinds of questions

that today's guest grapples with on a daily basis. He's most closely associated with the

tradition of effective altruism,

inquiring about what a good life and maximizing utility looks like in the 21st century.

He's a philosopher, author, a public intellectual of the highest order.

William McCaskill, welcome to downstream.

It's great to be on. You are somebody who is

at the intersection of big ideas, technology, politics, all the stuff we love talking about here

on downstream. You're tailor-made for it. For somebody out there who's listening or watching who

isn't necessarily familiar with who you are while we're talking to you. Who is Will McCaskill?

So I'm most well known as one of the co-founders of the effect of altruism movement. So that's a

movement of people who are trying to use their time and their money in whatever way will do

as much good as possible, where that means thinking about all the problems that the world

faces, of which there are very many, trying to think, okay, between all of these problems,

...