11
votes
The reluctant prophet of effective altruism: William MacAskill's movement set out to help global poor. Now his followers fret about runaway AI. Have they seen our threats clearly, or lost their way?
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism
- Authors
- The New Yorker
- Published
- Aug 8 2022
- Word count
- 10 670 words
Kind of feels a little like the rich are tending to the needs of the rich, in maximalising the amount of abstract good that can be done for the most amount of people, and solving problems that line up well with their biases. Not to say that it's not good, but I don't think that the movement can tackle wealth inequality if it depends on that inequality to maximize the amount of good it can do. (Also, a billionaire is already a paperclip maximizer compared to a normal person, and while the world isn't ideal, it's a bad look to snuff out future competition in the name of the unborn future.)
I think it's not necessarily a rich people problem but a smart nerd problem.
In a too-smart-for-their-own-good way.
Dangerous general AI is a 100–10,000 year existential problem, if at all. We have <100 year existential problems right now (climate change -> climate wars -> nuclear war?).
How do you know it's a 100 year problem and not a 10 year problem? It's very difficult to predict when scientific breakthroughs will happen.
AI safety gets a lot of attention but we shouldn’t let the interests of some EA people overshadow the other accomplishments of the movement. It’s still the case that all of GiveWell’s top recommended charities are dedicated to helping poor people in Africa in concrete ways. The amount of “money directed” by GiveWell has increased to above $500 million a year.
As money flows go, this isn’t enough to do much about global inequality. Governments and markets act at a much larger scale. But as charity work goes, it’s still a big success and we should hope that the trend continues.
I think that's always been my problem with the movement as well. Well intentioned on the individual level, but ultimately like bailing out a ship with a sieve when you're suggesting people become hedge fund managers and such to have a larger salary to donate. Taking our organization of society more or less for granted and often focusing on hyper abstract threats like a future AI paperclip maximizer while being blind to the human ones that run the show today.
This is really an excellent article that chronicles a saddening shift in the effective altruist movement that I wasn't fully aware had happened, from people who donated much of their modest salaries to deworming efforts in developing countries, to an intellectually incestuous group of people hemming and hawing over AI goal alignment while the planet burns and democracy dies.
For all my ultimately minor disagreements with the former group, I think they are basically correct and very principled, and you really feel for them as their movement is subverted into a kind of secular doomsday cult for rich people, that flawlessly reproduced all the biases EAs loathed about old school charities. It's ironically a pretty decent refutation of the simple utilitarianism that started the whole show in the first place.