The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism | The New Yorker
William MacAskill’s movement set out to help the global poor. Now his followers fret about runaway A.I. Have they seen our threats clearly, or lost their way?
Save this story Save this story The philosopher William MacAskill credits his personal transfiguration to an undergraduate seminar at Cambridge. Before this shift, MacAskill liked to drink too many pints of beer and frolic about in the nude, climbing pitched roofs by night for the life-affirming flush; he was the saxophonist in a campus funk band that played the May Balls, and was known as a hopeless romantic. But at eighteen, when he was first exposed to “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” a 1972 essay by the radical utilitarian Peter Singer, MacAskill felt a slight click as he was shunted ont
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