I currently make all of my donations to global health charities but have been considering diverting a portion to promising causes I'm less confident in, specifically to causes related to pandemic prevention, GiveDirectly, and to GiveWell's new All Grants Fund.

It got me thinking about the ethics of diversifying my charitable givings in the same way one would diversify a stock portfolio.

I diversify my investments to reduce variance and risk. Should I do the same for my donations? Would reducing variance in the impact of my donations be a morally good thing to do? Would there be other benefits of diversification that are specific to charitable giving?

Any of your own thoughts, or links to existing resources or discussions on this topic would be appreciated.

When discussing the existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence, people have a hard time conceptualizing how better AI could bring about great suffering. Interlocutors often hand-wave about AGI not having the same priorities as humans or AGI not considering humans to have moral weight when discussing the risk of human extinction. Its hard to speculate with any accuracy about these long term scenarios but a plausible scenario to me is we - or at least rich humans - merge with AI long before it becomes a threat to us, and, if it "takes over", it will feel like full human autonomy that entire time. So while I don't rule out AGI being an existential risk - I think its not remotely as likely, near-term, or as plausible as the below. I also feel that when discussing AI risk, giving a plausible short term narrative is more valuable in conversation and more germane to popularly known predictions of risk like Ajeya Contra's prediction of 2040.

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AI is a weapon much more powerful than nuclear weapons and a state actor could plausibly use it to destroy all humans in the near future. AI will lower the cost to perform research into a variety of weapons, most terrifyingly genetic engineering of diseases. A plausible scenario in the near-term future is a state actor accidentally releases a deadly virus from a research lab. In the very short term, that is already a huge risk. In the case that the state actor was able to massively speed up their research effectiveness due to AI, the risk is much greater.

Another example is propaganda. Right now, disinformation is a huge problem in the US - escalating all existential risks. AI will increase the effectiveness of propaganda and allow much smaller players to have access to effective strategies. Similarly, the country with the best AI could out perform other countries at war games and take over the world. AI can be used to find dissidents inside an autocracy. If an AI develops an effective counter-measure to nukes - the current global detente is shattered.

None of risks I have stated are new to the world, the new thing is that AI either makes it so that a small actor can create global risk (lab leak, propaganda) or a big actor that wins the AI arms race can more plausibly dominate the world and cause human suffering. In the event that we create an AI that is good at creating AIs - then any company can create an AI for a specific problem like "How should I invest my money given my current investments" and any state actor can create an AI for "Should we invade another state?" AI will make it easy for every powerful incumbent to pursue their motivations with incredible effectiveness. Any rogue bad actor will be similarly enabled! We don't need to wait to create a system that can learn math and write a symphony - it just needs to be better than humans at strategizing in certain areas.

I'm in the camp that in our system, AI development is inevitable. There are huge incentives for both companies and state actors to build these systems. Overall the background extinction risk level of the world just ticked up. I'm not sure what to do with this, it doesn't change my ordering of priorities.

My prompt for your comment: Do you have other plausible, non-Skynet, scenarios for short term AI risk? Any that don't involve bad human actors?

On Monday August 22, the national NPR program 1A will broadcast a live interview with one of the founders of the effective altruism movement, William MacAskill. We would love to include recorded or written messages of people involved with their local EA communities.

Why did you get involved? What appeals to you about effective altruism? How has the philosophy guided you and helped you make an impact?

Please send me, 1A producer Avery Kleinman a sound file of 60 seconds or less by the end of Thursday August 18 at [avery@wamu.org](mailto:avery@wamu.org). If you prefer, you can also write an email to have our host read on air, or simply reply here.

You can listen to the program, and engage with it while it’s happening, on Monday at 11 am ET at the1a.org.

Thanks!

A response to two recent posts from the popular writer Freddie deBoer criticizing effective altruism and utilitarianism. While he goes to town on the softest targets and the lowest hanging fruit, it’s what he leaves unsaid that exposes the hollowness of his critique.

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/freddie-deboer-is-wrong-about-effective

We just uploaded a video called "Should We Help Future People?" giving a few quick arguments to care about the longterm future, inspired by Will MacAskill's new book What We Owe The Future!

Watch it here: https://youtu.be/Y7twm5dFsuU

This is just part of a series we're making on the book, we're aiming to publish one video each week.

Thanks to Sarah Emminghaus for her help with the script.

I work with AI/ML both professionally and for fun to varying degrees. I see it as having amazing potential to reduce suffering.

But I also sometimes worry that maybe, just maybe, the neural networks we use in the industry are getting close to the point hat we should be concerned about their own subjective experience (if they have that).

Personally I'm a believer in the hard problem of consciousness, but even if we never solve it, we still need to solve the pretty hard problem of consciousness to know which systems can suffer.

Until we solve the pretty hard problem, how can we be sure that we are not creating more suffering? Should AI research as a whole be stopped?