Toby Ord

Birth Lottery If you were reborn today, where would you land? And how would that change your life?

Being born is a roll of the dice.

Most of us got insanely lucky.

Imagine you had to roll again, how would you want the world to look?

www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

GRB 250314A Pull-out (NIRCam image) GRB 250314A Pull-out (NIRCam image)

And to find out more about the dark red dot itself (whose explosion was designated GRB 250314A), see ESA's report here: www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

You can find out much more about the affectable universe and the ultimate limits of causality in our universe in a paper I wrote called 'The Edges of Our Universe':
17/17
arxiv.org/pdf/2104.01191

Here's a diagram I made, showing our place in the affectable universe, and its place within even greater regions:
16/

So if beings from Earth and that distant galaxy set off towards each other at close to the speed of light, they could yet meet.
15/

Though interestingly, current events in that star's galaxy could still affect *us*. Our affectable universe doesn’t include it and its affectable universe doesn’t include the Earth. But these spheres do overlap...
14/

So this image shows a star which is so far away that it is outside the affectable universe. Nothing we do here and now could ever affect it, and nothing that happens there now could ever affect the Earth.
13/

However, when a star explodes in a supernova, it releases so much energy in such a short time that it can outshine its entire galaxy, making an individual star visible at such an immense distance.
12/

The observable universe is (currently) about 3 times the diameter of the affectable universe, so there are many such stars that are observable but not affectable. Though until recently, we’d only been able to see entire galaxies of them as small smudges on the best Hubble images.
11/

Each year the observable universe grows in diameter as there is more time for the light to have reached us.
Each year the affectable universe shrinks by the same amount as there is less time for our light to reach the distant galaxies before they drift away.
10/

I call everything within this distance the "affectable universe". It is the lesser-known twin to the observable universe:
The observable universe is all places we can currently observe, while the affectable universe is all places we can currently affect.
9/

One way to think about this is that there is a critical distance — about 16.5 billion light years — that demarcates the part of the universe we could ever affect.
(This is all according to current known physics, assuming the standard ΛCDM cosmology).
8/

But the new star whose supernova explosion has just been detected as a dim red dot in the blackness between distant galaxies is more than twice as far away — about 29 billion light years. This is so far away that our light can never catch up (and nor could anything else).
7/

But the light would be gaining on it — making up the distance faster than Icarus can drift away. In 35 billion years our light would finally catch up.
So we *can* affect Icarus.
6/

14.4 billion light years is a long way. Light would take light 14.4 billion years to travel that distance. But during those years the intervening space would keep expanding, so Icarus would be even further away and even 14.4 billion years from now the light still wouldn’t have reached it.
5/

Icarus is currently about 14.4 billion light years from Earth and its light had been travelling for 9.3 billion years before it struck the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope. Those numbers differ because the space between us has expanded while the light was in flight.
4/

MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1 - Wikipedia

What is going on?
Until 2022, the furthest individual star ever discovered was “MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1” — aka “Icarus”.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MACS_J1...
3/

Whether or not we will ever be able to travel to other stars, we can usually affect them (and they can affect us) through the light we each emit.
Shine a torch into the night sky and you will personally affect galaxies billions of light years away.
But not in this case.
2/

Dim Red Dot
Scientists have just released a photo featuring a dim red dot. It is the light of a single star exploding in a galaxy so far far away that that nothing we do could ever affect it — even in the very fullness of time.
It lies beyond the Affectable Universe.
Let me explain…
1/🧵

New report on trends in AISI's evaluations of frontier AI models over the past two years. A lot of AI discourse focuses on viral moments, but it is important to zoom out to the less flashy trend: AI models are steadily growing in capabilities, including for dual-use.

www.aisi.gov.uk/frontier-ai-...

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US

This view is wrong

A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

Today is Giving Tuesday, and you can 100x the impact of your donations by finding the most effective charities.

This year, needs across global health, animal welfare, and catastrophic risk are rising while some major funders step back

The abstract of the consistency training paper.

New Google DeepMind paper: "Consistency Training Helps Stop Sycophancy and Jailbreaks" by @alexirpan.bsky.social, me, Mark Kurzeja, David Elson, and Rohin Shah. (thread)

Frontier AI could reach or surpass human level within just a few years. This could help solve global issues, but also carries major risks. To move forward safely, we must develop robust technical guardrails and make sure the public has a much stronger say. superintelligence-statement.org

When it Comes to AI, What We Don't Know Can Hurt Us Yoshua Bengio and Charlotte Stix explain how companies' internal, often private, AI development is a threat to society.

In an op-ed published today in TIME, Charlotte Stix and I discuss the serious risks associated with internal deployment by frontier AI companies.
We argue that maintaining transparency and effective public oversight are essential to safely manage the trajectory of AI.
time.com/7327327/ai-w...

What ideas are already out there, just waiting on someone to really feel their power and bring them down from the ivory tower?

During questions someone asked what we can learn about how to write an influential paper. Equally important is what we can learn about reading such a paper. So many philosophers had read it in the intervening generation, but none had taken it seriously.

It made me realise for the first time that I was essential in making it so — that one Australian in Oxford in 1971 had thrown the ball far far down the field, to be received by another Australian in Oxford in 2004.

Death in a Shallow Pond From the bestselling coauthor of Wittgenstein’s Poker, a fascinating account of Peter Singer’s controversial “drowning child” thought experiment—and how it changed the way people think about charitabl...

The other evening I attended the launch of David Edmonds' book on Peter Singer's Shallow Pond. I was quite struck when he called it 'the most influential thought experiment in the history of moral philosophy' yet with no influence for its first 30 years…
🧵
press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

We’re hiring!

Society isn’t prepared for a world with superhuman AI. If you want to help, consider applying to one of our research roles:
forethought.org/careers/res...

Not sure if you’re a good fit? See more in the reply (or just apply — it doesn’t take long)