Meet the techno-optimists hoping to save the world

Future House is a weird private members’ club. There’s a mattress on the floor for napping, a bathtub designed to hold ice and bottled beers, a robot dog imported from China and a purple neon sign that reads: ‘Just F***ing Build Something.’ Around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, the place is rammed. ‘I missed the dotcom era, I’m not missing this one,’ someone says. ‘People need to stop moaning about artificial intelligence,’ says another.

Future House, in an old coaching house in Hackney, is described on its website as ‘London’s techno-optimist members’ club’. Techno-optimism? Adherents believe that technological progress is the best way to fix the world’s problems. Techno-optimism is one of a set of new ideologies, fashionable among Britain’s recent graduates and twentysomethings, about how to better civilisation.

William MacAskill, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, came up with ‘effective altruism’, the first of these ‘New Solutions’. The basic idea is that charity should be focused on saving the maximum number of lives. Rather than giving £20 to one homeless man to sleep in a hostel in London for a night, spend the same money feeding a family in Africa for a week. In 2009, MacAskill started Giving What We Can, an organisation that encouraged people to donate 10 per cent of their income to ‘effective charities’.

MacAskill worked alongside other left-field academics at the Future of Humanity Institute, a small and strange Oxford department located on the outskirts of the city. ‘It was ground zero for effective altruism,’ says Anders Sandberg, who also worked there. ‘It was open 24 hours,’ says a former Oxford PhD student. ‘There were places to sleep. Free food. Very well stocked fridges. Lots of protein bars.’

MacAskill seemed to run the show – along with Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, founder of the institute.