This article, published by Current Exchange/Technophilic Magazine, provides an overview of the ethics of global catastrophic risk as it relates to astrobiology. Technophilic is a magazine for science and engineering students, and so the article presents a personal perspective of how I transitioned from an engineering grad student to someone active on global catastrophic risk. The article would be a nice read for current science & engineering students who are looking for perspective on how they can use their skills & careers to make the world (and the universe!) a better place.
The article begins as follows:
I think it’s important to dream big, to be ambitious, to want to make the world a better place. The question is how we can best go about doing this. To answer this, we need both science and ethics. In the process, we get to see an amazing journey from our own lives to the very end of the universe – and a major plot twist.
This story’s personal for me. As an engineering student in college and grad school, I often wondered about which technologies I should be trying to design. My training left me good at design, but not at making these decisions about what to design. So I started looking elsewhere, and found ethics, which is the study of what is good/bad, right/wrong, and what we should/shouldn’t do. It’s quite a different field of study from science and engineering, but critically important if we are to make the right decisions about our lives, our work, and the world that we live in.
With ethics, we can answer questions like ‘What does it mean to make the world a better place?’ There are many ways of answering this question, corresponding with different views about ethics. My own view (which is a fairly common view) is that we make the world a better place by improving quality of life for people around the world, as well as for sentient nonhuman animals. (Don’t kick puppies!) In formal terms, the goal is to maximize total quality of life for everyone out there. Those of you with some calculus can imagine maximizing quality of life integrated across space and time.
The remainder of the article is available in PDF archive or from Current Exchange/Technophilic Magazine.
Image credit: 2MASS/G. Kopan, R. Hurt
This blog post was published on 17 April 2024 as part of a website overhaul and backdated to reflect the time of the publication of the work referenced here.