Toby Ord

Toby Ord is a Senior Researcher at Oxford University’s AI Governance Initiative. His work focuses on the big picture questions facing humanity. What are the most important issues of our time? How can we best address them?

Ord’s earlier work explored the ethics of global health and global poverty, demonstrating that aid has been highly successful on average and has the potential to be even more successful if we were to improve our priority setting. This led him to create an international society called Giving What We Can. It now has more than 5,000 members, who have jointly pledged more than $1.9 billion to the most effective charities helping to improve the world. He also a co-founder of the philosophy and social movement known as effective altruism. This arose out of the thinking behind Giving What We Can, and is fundamentally about using evidence and reason to help people as much as possible. He co-founded the Centre for Effective Altruism to foster projects such as Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Global Priorities Project, which apply these ideas to charities, careers, and policy.

His current research is on the long term future of humanity, and the risks which threaten to destroy our entire potential. His book, The Precipice, explores these topics and concludes that safeguarding our future is among the most pressing and neglected issues we face.

Ord has advised the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the World Economic Forum, and the UK Prime Minister’s Office. His work has been featured hundreds of times in the national and international media including BBC, NBC, Sky News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.

Ord is also a research affiliate at Forethought.