2025 Parfit Memorial Lecture – a summary | Practical Ethics

By Paul Heller (DPhil Student at the Uehiro Oxford Institute) On Friday 16th June, Jacob Nebel, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, gave the 2025 Parfit Memorial Lecture. Professor Nebel’...

blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk

Jeffrey Ely | Natural Selection of Artificial Intelligence

We study the AI control problem in the context of decentralized eco- nomic production. Profit-maximizing firms employ artificial intelligence to automate aspects of production. This creates a feedback...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

Shutdownable Agents through POST-Agency - Elliott Thornley

Many fear that future artificial agents will resist shutdown. I present an idea – the POST-Agents Proposal – for ensuring that doesn’t happen. I propose that we train agents to satisfy Preferences Onl...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

Atkinson Memorial Lecture 2024 - Jeffrey Ely

The Atkinson Memorial Lecture is an annual distinguished lecture series established in 2018 in memory of Professor Sir Tony Atkinson, jointly by the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) and the Departmen...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

Parfit Memorial Lecture 2025 - Jacob M. Nebel

The Parfit Memorial Lecture is an annual distinguished lecture series established by the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) in memory of Derek Parfit. The aim is to encourage research among academic ph...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

The structure of critical sets - Walter Bossert, Susumu Cato and Kohei Kamaga

The purpose of this paper is to address some ambiguities and misunderstandings that appear in previous studies of population ethics. In particular, we examine the structure of intervals that are emplo...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

Population ethics with thresholds - Walter Bossert, Susumu Cato and Kohei Kamaga

We propose a new class of social quasi-orderings in a variable-population setting. In order to declare one utility distribution at least as good as another, the critical-level utilitarian value of the...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

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The Economics of Transformative AI Summer 2025

Some claim that advanced AI will greatly accelerate economic growth, displace labor, and/or risk existential catastrophe. This course covers a selection of tools in (mainly) economic theory relevant t...

digitaleconomy.stanford.edu

Once More, Without Feeling - Andreas Mogensen

I argue for a pluralist theory of moral standing, on which both welfare subjectivity and autonomy can confer moral status. I argue that autonomy doesn’t entail welfare subjectivity, but can ground mor...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

Numbers Tell, Words Sell - Michael Thaler, Mattie Toma and Victor Yaneng Wang

When communicating numeric estimates with policymakers, journalists, or the general public, experts must choose between using numbers or natural language. We run two experiments to study whether exper...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

In Defence of Moderation - Jacob Barrett

A decision theory is fanatical if it says that, for any sure thing of getting some finite amount of value, it would always be better to almost certainly get nothing while having some tiny probability ...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

Measuring AI-Driven Risk with Stock Prices - Susana Campos-Martins

We propose an empirical approach to identify and measure AI-driven shocks based on the co-movements of relevant financial asset prices. For that purpose, we first calculate the common volatility of th...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

Imperfect Recall and AI Delegation - Eric Olav Chen, Alexis Ghersengorin and Sami Petersen

A principal wants to deploy an artificial intelligence (AI) system to perform some task. But the AI may be misaligned and aim to pursue a conflicting objective. The principal cannot restrict its optio...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org

Research agenda - Global Priorities Institute

The central focus of GPI is what we call ‘global priorities research’: research into issues that arise in response to the question, ‘What should we do with a given amount of limited resources if our a...

globalprioritiesinstitute.org