[4] He was a senior research fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, where his work focused on existential risk.

Having submitted his doctoral thesis, Beyond Action: Applying Consequentialism to Decision Making and Motivation, Ord was retained as a junior research fellow by Balliol College, Oxford.

Those future people, whose quality of life and very existence will be intimately affected by our choices today, matter as much as we do.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.

[15] 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.

[16] 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.

[20] 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.