Ha Ha!

I am not in the least surprised that Oxford has shuttered The Future of Humanity Institute, an organization dedicated to pandering to tech bros and promulgating the now disgraced philosophy of Effective Altruism.

This is not a surprise.  

The only justification for Oxford associating itself with this temple of banality was it's ability to extract million dollar donations, and with EA in disrepute, that justification is gone.

Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run 0by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movem0ent and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated £1m to the FHI in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a decade on X, formerly Twitter.

The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Musk all wrote blurbs for his 2014 bestselling book Superintelligence.

Those endorsements do not seem to me to engender confidence in anyone who can lay a claim to being a mindful human being.

.......

The closure of Bostrom’s center is a further blow to the effective altruism and long-termism movements that the philosopher had spent decades championing, and which in recent years have become mired in scandals related to racism, sexual harassment and financial fraud. Bostrom himself issued an apology last year after a decades-old email surfaced in which he claimed “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but I am thinking that much of the allure for Musk and his ilk was that his center could provide philosophical cover for their racist and eugenicist beliefs.

Morally reprehensible for sure, but it beats working for a living.