The Info Web

#Longtermism

18 entries

People (8)

  • Derek Parfit Derek Parfit was an Oxford philosopher at All Souls College whose 1984 Reasons and Persons set out the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion, becoming a foundation of longtermism, and who lived with austere single-mindedness.
  • Émile P. Torres Philosopher and historian of existential-risk thought who wrote a 2017 introduction to existential risks, then attacked longtermism in 2021 and coined the acronym TESCREAL, developed with Timnit Gebru.
  • Holden Karnofsky Cofounder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy and its co-CEO until 2023, a Redwood Research director, an OpenAI director from 2017 to 2021, Anthropic staff from 2025, and husband of Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
  • Nate Thomas Stanford-affiliated machine-learning researcher who cofounded Redwood Research in 2021 as chief executive, later chaired its board, and led the affiliated Constellation Institute in Berkeley.
  • Nick Beckstead American philosopher, Open Philanthropy program officer and Effective Ventures director who ran the FTX Foundation and Future Fund, was sued and then dismissed by the FTX debtors, and co-founded Secure AI Project.
  • Nick Bostrom Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher who cofounded the transhumanist movement, founded Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, wrote the AI-existential-risk book Superintelligence, is called the father of longtermism, and in 2023 admitted to a 1990s email asserting that black people are less intelligent than white people.
  • Toby Ord Toby Ord is an Australian moral philosopher at Oxford who cofounded Giving What We Can and the effective altruism movement, was a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, and wrote The Precipice, which argues there is a one-in-six chance humanity suffers an existential catastrophe this century.
  • William MacAskill William MacAskill is a Scottish moral philosopher at Oxford who cofounded effective altruism through Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism, wrote the longtermist book What We Owe the Future, recruited Sam Bankman-Fried into earning-to-give, and resigned from the FTX Future Fund when the exchange collapsed in 2022.

Organizations (7)

  • Centre for Effective Altruism Oxford charity company incorporated in 2012 under MacAskill, Ord and Beckstead, with a US twin that Bankman-Fried served as treasurer and director, renamed Effective Ventures in 2022 and investigated after FTX's collapse.
  • Effective Ventures Effective Ventures was the umbrella charity that legally housed the central effective-altruism organizations, took roughly 27 million dollars from Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX in 2022, repaid all of it to the FTX bankruptcy estate in a 2024 settlement, and then resolved to spin out all of its projects into independent bodies.
  • FTX Future Fund The FTX Future Fund was the philanthropic vehicle launched in February 2022 by Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX Foundation, run by Nick Beckstead with Will MacAskill and others, which committed roughly $160 million to longtermist, AI-safety, and biosecurity causes before its entire team resigned and the money was clawed back when FTX collapsed in November 2022.
  • Future of Humanity Institute The Future of Humanity Institute was a research center at the University of Oxford founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom that became the academic headquarters of longtermism and AI-existential-risk research, drew funding from Elon Musk and the FTX Future Fund, and was closed by the university in April 2024.
  • Open Philanthropy Grantmaker of Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, renamed Coefficient Giving in 2025, which has given away about 7 billion dollars and funded CSET, RAND's AI work, Horizon fellows and Tarbell journalists.
  • Redwood Research Berkeley AI-alignment nonprofit founded in 2021, with Open Philanthropy co-CEO Holden Karnofsky on its board until 2023, to which Open Philanthropy gave 62.52 million dollars from 2021 to 2025.
  • Survival and Flourishing Fund The Survival and Flourishing Fund is the grant-allocation vehicle backed chiefly by Jaan Tallinn that uses a software-assisted method called the S-process to direct money to existential-risk, AI-safety, and longtermist organizations, having organized roughly 150 million dollars in gifts since 2019.

Concepts (3)

  • Effective Altruism Effective Altruism is a movement that emerged around 2011 from Oxford philosophy and the LessWrong rationalist community, advancing evidence-based giving and a 'longtermist' concern with the far future and artificial-intelligence risk, whose 2013 summit Peter Thiel keynoted and whose largest funder, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in the 2022 FTX fraud.
  • TESCREAL TESCREAL is an acronym coined by Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru for a bundle of seven overlapping ideologies, transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism, that they argue share roots in twentieth-century eugenics and together drive the race to build artificial general intelligence.
  • Utilitarianism Utilitarianism is the moral theory, running from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill through Henry Sidgwick to Peter Singer, that the right act maximizes aggregate welfare, and its quantifying logic became the operating premise of effective altruism and longtermism.