You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero podcast.

Hi, Emile.

Hi.

Nice to be here.

Good to have you.

Let me introduce this.

I'm Robert Wright, publisher of the Non-Zero Newsletter, and this is the Non-Zero podcast.

And you are Emil P. Torres, the author most recently in the book Human Extinction,

A History of the Science and Ethics of

Annihilation, We will have reason to talk more about human extinction before this is over.

I'm very interested in this and looking forward to it because you are, I would say, one of the fiercest, if not the fiercest critic of effective altruism, such related movements as long-termism and some other ones that you see is closely related to it that we'll get into.

And yet, there was a time when you were a card-carrying member of the effect of altruism movement,

something of a long-termist yourself. And in fact, I just went back and listened to a conversation

you and I had on kind of the predecessor of this platform that evolved into the non-zero podcast platform six years ago.

At that point, you were at an institute co-founded by noted long-termist Nick Bostrom.

You seem to have no complaints about being that. You talked about the risk of the coming risk of

superintelligence. And of course, that's one place where this is long-termism has entered the news in a big way

with this whole debate.

Some of the big AI Dumeers are long-termists.

And we'll get into the meaning of these terms a little bit more.

And of course, effective altruism first entered, I would say, public view in a big

and kind of notorious way, beginning a little more than a year ago when the San Bankman

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