PERSON
Holden Karnofsky
The professional skeptic who built a career refusing extraordinary claims—and then followed his own evidence to the conclusion that we may be living through the most important century in human history.
Holden Karnofsky is, by temperament and training, the least likely person to tell you the world is about to change beyond recognition. He co-founded GiveWell on the conviction that almost everything people believe about charitable impact is unsupported by evidence, and built a methodology of relentless, almost obsessive skepticism around it. So when a man who made a discipline of doubting extraordinary claims argues that the twenty-first century could be the
most important century ever for humanity, the claim arrives not as the enthusiasm of a futurist but as the reluctant conclusion of a skeptic who followed his own evidence somewhere he did not expect to go. His path runs from the unglamorous arithmetic of cost-effective charity to a body of writing that asks, with disarming plainness, what happens if the trend lines we already observe simply continue. In the cycle that began with
[YOU] on AI—which argues we have crossed a threshold the old institutions cannot survive—Karnofsky is the methodological conscience,