William MacAskill: belief

Transcript context

…What should I target? I think people potentially doing dangerous biotechnology research, things that could have large negative externalities. I don’t know about the law there. People who are patent trolls seem like that’s particularly harmful, it seems to me, like slowing down innovation. Perhaps legal work there could be very helpful as well. I’m curious — this is a little bit more theoretical and depends on the nature of the lawyer. It’s plausible to me that at some point in our lifetimes, there will be a world government set up. That world government will have a constitution. The forming of the Constitution of the United States was enormously impactful from a very long-term perspective, and yet it was done over the course of about four months. We can think in terms of these plastic moments that have a real impact over the future. I think that whoever’s writing the constitution of the world government — that is going to be a very influential moment. You could be one of the weird lawyers who are working on this that no one is currently working on, but will turn out to be very impactful if it did occur over the next century. You have a PhD from Oxford, right?…

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