I am a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy and a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Oxford. 

 

I was a PhD student in philosophy at NYU from 2016-2018. I have a BPhil in philosophy from Oxford, and a BA in philosophy from Yale.

 

I blog at Hands and Cities. Favorite posts include: ​

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• On infinite ethics

• Actually possible: thoughts on Utopia

• Can you control the past?

• On future people, looking back at 21st century longtermism

• Against neutrality about creating happy lives (podcast version here)

• Thoughts on being mortal

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Research: 

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• Is power-seeking AI an existential risk? (video presentation; slides; reviews; google doc version)

• How much computational power does it take to match the human brain? (medium-length summary here) 

 

Audio:

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• "Utopia on earth and morality without guilt," on Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg. 

• "Creating Utopia," on the Utilitarian Podcast with Gus Docker. Transcript here.  

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Video:

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• Existential Risk from Power-seeking AI (Harvard Effective Altruism Agathon Lecture Series)

• Orienting towards the long-term future (Effective Altruism Global 2017)

 

I spent the academic year of 2017-18 helping Toby Ord write The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, which is a clear statement of a number of ideas that matter to me: notably, that human history might be just beginning; that the future could be incomprehensibly vast and extraordinary; and that it is extremely important that we do not mess up in a way that destroys this possibility. This New Yorker piece about Toby and the book is also a good summary.

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I am also interested in meditation. I've spent over a year of my life on silent meditation retreat, in stretches ranging from a few days to three months.

 

Email: joseph [dot] k [dot] carlsmith [at] gmail [dot] com

 

Here is my CV.

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Other writing: 

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• Killing the ants (Portuguese translation here)

• On clinging

• Wholehearted choices and "morality as taxes"

• On the limits of idealized values

• The innocent gene

• Care and demandingness

• The despair of normative realism bot

• The ignorance of normative realism bot

• Alienation and meta-ethics (or: is it possible you should maximize helium?)

• Contact with reality

• The importance of how you weigh it

• Problems of evil

• Believing in things you cannot see

• SIA > SSA (series)

• On the Universal Distribution

• Anthropics and the Universal Distribution

• Simulation arguments

• On expected utility

• In search of benevolence (or: what should you get Clippy for Christmas?)

• Subjectivism and moral authority

• Morality and constrained maximization

• Grokking illusionism

• Thoughts on personal identity

• The impact merge

• A ghost

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