Toby Ord

Career

Ord held the position of research fellow at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute from 2014 until 2019, and senior research fellow from 2019 until the institute's shutdown in 2024. Ord describes his focus as "the big picture questions facing humanity." He is a trustee of the Centre for Effective Altruism and of the non-profit organization 80,000 Hours, researching careers that have the largest positive social impact and providing career advice based on that research.

Research

Ethics

Ord's work has been primarily in moral philosophy. In applied ethics, he has worked on bioethics, the demands of morality, and global priority setting. He has also made contributions in global health, as an advisor to the third edition of Disease Control Priorities Project. In normative ethics, his research has focused on consequentialism and on moral uncertainty.

Existential risk

Ord's current main research interest is existential risk. His book on the topic The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity was published in March 2020. The New Yorker characterizes Ord's research motivation as follows:

A concern for existential risk seemed, to Ord, to be the next logical expansion of a broadening moral circle. If we can learn to value the lives of people in other places and circumstances equally to our own, then we can do the same for people situated at a different moment in time. Those future people, whose quality of life and very existence will be intimately affected by our choices today, matter as much as we do.

Hypercomputation

Ord has written papers on the viability and potentials for hypercomputation, models of computation that can provide outputs that are not Turing-computable such as a machine that could solve the halting problem.

Giving What We Can

At Oxford, Ord resolved to give a significant proportion of his income to the most cost-effective charities he could find. Following a number of enquiries from people interested in making a similar commitment, Ord decided to set up an organisation geared towards supporting like-minded donors. In 2009, Ord launched Giving What We Can, an international society whose members have each pledged to donate at least 10% of their income to the most cost-effective charities. The organisation is aligned with, and part of, the effective altruism movement. Giving What We Can seeks not only to encourage people to give more of their money to charity but also stresses the importance of giving to the most cost-effective ones, arguing that "you can often do 100x more good with your dollar by donating to the best charities." By July 2024, Giving What We Can had grown to over 9,000 members, who have already donated $253 million to effective charities.

Ord himself decided initially to cap his income at £20,000 per year, and to give away everything he earned above that to well-researched charities. A year later, he revised this figure down to £18,000. This threshold rises annually with inflation. As of December 2019, he had donated £106,000, or 28 percent of his income. Over the course of his career, he expects his donations to total around £1 million.

Personal life

Ord lives in Oxford with his wife, Bernadette Young, a medical doctor.