Émile Torres on Transhumanism, Longtermism and Existential Dangers

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My aim with this podcast has all the time been to be a little bit of a gadfly to your in addition to my mental progress and, hopefully, a midwife to your finest concepts relatively than a disseminator of a selected motion or ideology. Thus, whereas I’ve by no means hidden my private views, I don’t attempt to make you a believer and follower however merely to offer essential and useful folks and concepts on your consideration. What you do then is, in fact, completely as much as you.

Émile Torres is a thinker and historian whose work focuses on existential threats to humanity. Throughout this 2-hour dialog with Émile, we cowl quite a lot of thrilling subjects corresponding to escatology and teleology; determinism and inevitability; Kurzweil’s timeline and the last word finish of the Universe; ChatGPT and AGI; the Rapture and Émile’s Baptist upbringing; watching out for our personal biases and blindspots; Transhumanism, Faith, and Eugenics; the issues with defining, measuring, and boasting about (your) intelligence; Nick Bostom’s racism, narcissism, integrity, and doubtful math in papers corresponding to Astronomical Waste; the character and hazard of existential dangers; the risks of (Radical) Longtermism.

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Who’s Émile Torres? [They, Them]

Émile Torres’s work has centered round a single theme: eschatology, whether or not non secular, secular, or scientific. Just lately, they’ve centered on the character and causes of human extinction, its moral implications, and the historical past of the concept.​

Torres used to jot down for the Way forward for Life Institute and was beforehand a analysis assistant to Ray Kurzweil and an Affiliate Scholar on the Institute for Ethics and Rising Applied sciences. Émile spent a while at Harvard College and earned a grasp’s diploma in Neuroscience from Brandeis College, though their background is the philosophy of thoughts and the philosophy of science/biology. They’re presently a Ph.D. candidate at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. Their forthcoming e-book Human Extinction: A Historical past of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation (Routledge), is a sprawling work of mental historical past, ethics, and inhabitants axiology. Torres is educating a course this semester titled “The Ethics of Human Extinction,” which could be the first ever on this subject.​

Émile has revealed in scholarly journals like Erkenntnis, Futures, Bioethics, Aggression and Violent Habits, Foresight, Metaphilosophy, Inquiry, and the South African Journal of Philosophy, amongst others, and a chapter on algocracy was included within the Amazon bestseller Synthetic Intelligence Security and Safety. They’ve additionally revealed articles in well-liked media like TIME, Slate, The Washington Publish, Aeon, Motherboard, Nautilus, Free Inquiry, Truthout, Counterpunch, Widespread Goals, The Progressive, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Torres is presently a contributing author at Salon.

Their earlier e-book (2017) was Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Dangers, which included a foreword from Lord Martin Rees. In 2019, Émile Torres spent a number of months as a Visiting Scholar on the Centre for the Examine of Existential Threat on the College of Cambridge, and have given talks on the Way forward for Humanity Institute (on the College of Oxford), Princeton College, and the Chalmers College of Know-how, to call just a few.​

They’ve appeared on many podcasts and interviewed about human extinction, synthetic intelligence, and associated subjects on BBC radio, NowThis, and Al Jazeera TV (reside). Torres is scheduled to seem in a forthcoming docu-series streaming on Netflix about secular apocalyptic situations.​

On a private observe, Émile Torres is keen about assuaging world poverty and have pledged to provide away every thing they make over $35k a yr. In a earlier life, they had been a musician and audio engineer and have offered a bunch of songs to MTV.

For extra, go to their web site and comply with them on Twitter.