Important (present and future) real-world applications of academic philosophy

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Many people think that academic philosophy is irrelevant to the real world. But it has increasingly important applications. Here's my list of some of the really interesting ones. Here's hoping philosophers will make further progress on some of these! 1. The Trolley Problem: self-driving cars will be put in situations where there is a choice between sacrificing the passenger to save two pedestrians. Or they might have to choose between killing a 5-year-old pedestrian vs. killing a 70-year-...
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16 Potentially-Dystopian Utopias

Suppose that humans one day (whether 20 or 200 years from now) create far more advanced technology, with power sufficient to reshape what the world is like, and even to determine what humanity becomes. If that comes to pass, we’re going to be in trouble unless we also reach a better understanding of our own values and resolve the inconsistencies in them. We don’t have sufficient clarity on our values to say what the ideal world looks like. So if we ever have the power to truly redesign the w...
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Tough Questions about Utopia

Some tough questions for you about utopia (along with my very tentative and very likely wrong guesses for answers): If you were attempting to design a true utopia for ten million people on an obscure island deep out in the ocean, and you had total control over institutions and unlimited money, but you could NOT change human nature or human psychology then:(a) what would you hope people would spend their time doing in this utopia?(b) how would you incentivize people to actually spend their t...
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