Conference Presentation, Keynote
Toby Ord: "In which career can you make the most difference?"
- Philosophy focused on reason and meta-ethics is predicted to become largely irrelevant due to a dominance of commentators over problem solvers, whereas applying analytic philosophy to practical moral issues is expected to define the future relevance of the field.
- An average individual is projected to have approximately 60 years of life remaining with roughly 80,000 career hours available, suggesting that investing around 800 hours to improve career impact by 1% yields high value.
- While individual efforts can match the impact of saving approximately 1,200 lives, historical precedents demonstrate vastly larger potential: Alan Turing's work may have saved millions by shortening World War II by a year, Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat saved 245 million lives, and Viktor Shibanov's proposal led to the eradication of smallpox by 1980.
- Bill Gates is expected to have donated $28 billion and aims to donate $95 billion (95% of wealth) while leaving $5 billion to his children, a contribution that helped shift the culture of over 67 American billionaires to pledge donating more than 50% of their wealth.
- Future charitable impact is anticipated to grow significantly as ethics influence public discourse on global poverty and factory farming, with projections that four additional diseases may be eradicated within the next 20 years.
- Charitable interventions are estimated to vary in value up to 100 times the median, allowing grant-makers to access millions of pounds to generate equivalent outcomes by shifting funds to the most effective causes.
- Research output for top physicists is estimated to increase by 20% if researchers assume their teaching loads, potentially allowing others to convert 1% to 50% of their time into the output of a super-productive person by managing low-value tasks.
- Despite the average graduate earning several million pounds or potentially 6 to 10 million pounds in finance, no specific formula is provided to guarantee billionaire status, though rough quantitative metrics accurate within a factor of two can identify careers producing 500 to 2,000 times more good.
- Broad metrics of value extending beyond life-saving to include health, quality of life, and animal welfare are encouraged, with the expectation that groups maximizing expected career value will achieve significantly better outcomes than those adopting risk-averse strategies.
- Risks include audiences becoming bogged down in everyday life, with the suggested mitigation of subscribing to the 80,000 Hours mailing list to receive reminders, alongside the observation that current research attention on dung beetles vastly exceeds that on human extinction risks.