The Morality of Having Kids in a Magical, Maybe Simulated World

With the emerging ability to improve the embodied experience for all sentient beings, our species is entering a painful adolescent phase. We must realize it is no longer acceptable to coast along on values and purpose inherited from the past, without needing to exercise agency and responsibility to decide what we will work toward. We have to accept... See more

Or even setting abortion aside, you’d think longtermists might express concern about the decline in fertility in industrialized countries, a question that some rationalists like Hanson have explored but EAs—80 percent of whom are childless, according to Alexander’s survey[*23]—rarely do, perhaps because it codes as conservative. At other times, tho

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God games invite us to peer at human society like it is an ant farm. In playing god games, we replay the systems that have failed us, in shrunken-down, simplified form. The repetition of these systems at miniature scale sustains the notion that they are natural, the infinite complexity and incalculable possibility that characterizes human society o... See more

Since MacAskill had first sold Sam, back in the fall of 2012, on the idea of earning to give, the EA movement had obviously changed. It had become a lot less interested in saving the lives of existing human beings than future ones. In early 2020, movement cofounder Toby Ord had published a book, The Precipice, which laid out where his thinking (and

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