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Note that if you sort the comments by New rather than Top, a smaller fraction say very positive things.

Kurzgesagt - The Last Human (Longtermist video)

Jun 28 20221 min read 17

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Existential riskVideoEffective altruism art and fictionLongtermism

This is a linkpost for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEENEFaVUzU

Kurzgesagt's recent video, "The Last Human – A Glimpse Into The Far Future," invites viewers to consider the potential for a vast number of future people. "If we don't kill ourselves in the next few centuries or millennia, almost all humans that will ever exist will live in the future."

Here's the video:

Kurzgesagt has some other very relevant videos (and some other cool videos):

Note: If you were involved in making the video happen and want to author or coauthor this link-post, please let me know!

150 Reactions

Mentioned in

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[anonymous]Jun 29 202243

Open Phil is funding this Kurzgesagt YouTube channel. I don't think Open Phil have tried funding anything else yet in this ballpark or reference class, so will be pretty cool to see how it goes.

MathiasKB🔸Jun 29 202242

Many of the comments in this video were incredibly inspiring for me to read.

Most outside engagement with EA I see tends to scew heavily negative. I tend to disprortionally focus on the negative as those impressions are especially important for me to understand, so reading comments claiming how inspired they felt by the prospects of humanity, was so refreshing! Where was the all the sneering I'm so used to!?

DavidNashJun 29 202220

The right framing can make a big difference.

Also I see lots of positive comments from people who have done the Intro EA virtual program or who have read Doing Good Better.

It may also be a difference between how YouTube comments are quite positive these days and Twitter still has incentives for negative comments.

WilliamKielyJul 3 20224

Note that if you sort the comments by New rather than Top, a smaller fraction say very positive things.

WilliamKielyJul 2 202212

A thing I didn't like about this video was how it mentioned asteroids and climate change and nuclear weapons and how diseases can quickly spread around the world but not the elephant in the room--AI.

Perhaps they thought provoking questions by mentioning AI would ruin the optimistic reaction that a lot of viewers had?

Anton RodenhauserJun 29 202210

Could it be that "working at kurzgesagt" is an effective thing to do? One of the legitimate "communication paths"?

EAs working at Kurzgesagt could:

steer them to create even more EA-aligned content
gain valuable "communication knowledge", to be used to create EA content later/elsewhere. Kurzgesagt does such a great job promoting ideas like longtermism in an uncontroversial not weird way that gets people to obviously agree with it - something EA often struggles with within media. We need to learn from them! And we want all the great EA content from 80k and elsewhere in a Kurzgesagt-style video format as well, and need people learning how to do that! AI alignment Youtube channels like Rob Miles' are great, but with someone with expertise from Kurzgesagt it could be so much better?!
Help Kurzgesagt to scale up massivly. They are already big but could be much bigger still. I'm thinking documentaries, educational books, apps, videogames, movies in cinemas, whole TV series, various subchannels for different topics and audiences, etc. Let's help them become a giant media empire with a huge movement around it!

David MJul 1 20221

Great point. I wonder what’s the role behind a video that has the most influence on its success - the scriptwriter? The visual designer? Or someone a bit more zoomed out?

Michael_WiebeJun 28 20229

If we don't kill ourselves in the next few centuries or millennia, almost all humans that will ever exist will live in the future.

The idea is that, after a few millenia, we'll have spread out enough to reduce extinction risks to ~0?

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸Jun 28 202212

Even without considering that, if we stay at ~140 million births per year, in 800 years 50% of all humans will have been born in our future.
And in ~7 millennia 90% of all humans will have been born in our future.

SharmakeJun 28 20223

Basically, yes. Assuming civilization survives the Singularity, existential risks are effectively zero thanks to the fact that it's almost impossible to destroy an interstellar civilization.

AndreFerrettiJun 29 20226

What a beautiful project for Open Philanthropy to sponsor! I was so happy to see my favourite YouTube channel publish this video :)

John DoeJun 30 20225

This is essentially a longterminist motivational video ❤️

Haven't felt this longterminist since reading chapter 2 of The Precipice.

WimJun 30 20223

Anyone know how we could access the stats on this video (e.g. how many people clicked through the links on the banner) ? These might be useful for gauging how well suited EA ideas are to this media format and how much we should invest in creating similar content going forward!

BellaJul 4 202227

3,134 people clicked through to the 80k longtermism article from the Kurzgesagt video. At time of writing, the video has 4.2m views, meaning 0.07% of viewers clicked the link. 85 of those people subscribed to the 80k newsletter (2.24% conversion rate, compared to a 4.2% site average).

BellaJun 30 20225

I'll reply to this comment with our stats on the link to 80,000 Hours' article in a week or so (or when the video stops getting many more views per day)

WimJun 30 20221

Great! Thank you.

Jelle DondersJul 2 20222

Collaborations like these have so much potential! Because of this video alone, millions will learn about these ideas and many thousands will get inspired by them. Very glad Open Phil pursued this and hoping to see more efforts like this.