The Future of Humanity Institute and the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology are pleased to announce the winners of the Crucial Considerations for the Future of Humanity Thesis Abstract Competition.
From a large number of very high quality entries, the winning entry (receiving £2,000) was:
Nick Beckstead (Rutgers University)
Global priority setting and existential risk crucial ethical considerations
Due to the large number of high-quality entrants, six second prize winners were chosen, each of whom will receive £200. These are as follows:
Sebastian Farquhar (Oxford University)
Trends in automation and the unemployability problem
James Hall (Oxford University)
Facing the future progress as technological change
George McGowan (Oxford Brookes University)
How much (dis)value could future civilisations have
G Owen Schaefer (Oxford University)
Challenges for moral enhancement a research proposal
Aron Vallinder (Lund University)
Preferences elicitation, extrapolation and aggregation
Carissa Veliz (CUNY Graduate Centre)
Testing the motivational impact of moral arguments concerning global poverty
The following entries received honourable mentions for their excellence:
Adam Bales (Monash University)
“Future proofing democracy”
Sean Conley (Oxford University)
“What will happen when the jobs run out?”
Tienmu Ma (NYU)
“Applied ethics, systematic moral theory, and human progress”
Thank you to everyone who entered the Thesis Topic competition! Our selectors were very impressed with the consistently high standard of entries, and had a very hard time making a final decision on winners.