#467 — EA, AI, and the End of Work

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Well, McCasco, thanks for joining me again on the podcast. It's great to be back on. Yeah, I don't know how many times it says, but it's many.

“Yeah, I think this is maybe number four on the main part.”

Yeah, yeah, awesome. Well, you are my go-to guy on so many ethical questions, but effective altruism being the frame under which we think about these things. You have a tenth anniversary of your book doing good better, it's just come upon us, there's a new addition. That's like.

Yeah. And what's changed about the actual text? So in the text, the statistics are updated, and there's a new forward, which is the responding to some objections, and reflecting a little bit on the last 10 years, growth in some of these ideas.

Well, the last 10 years have been an eventful for EA. Let's, I think, are the last time we spoke, we dealt with much of the controversy around Stamp Backman Freed and FTX, and all of that brain damage. Is there more to say about that? And how is the EA movement/community doing now, and what has been the net effect of all

of that?

“Yeah, I think the main thing to say is that, obviously, that was a huge hit, it's like”

huge knockback. But now, if you're looking at influence of the ideas, you know, really want matters, then there's been enormous restoration of growth. So if you look at, for example, how much money is being moved to effective non-profit? That figure, I mean, actually grew just kind of steadily, even through these periods of, you

know, to barbine, in cryptocurrency, and billions and so on.

But over the last year, best guesses that go about 50% is closing in on $2 billion a year now.

And that's not just for the small number of large donors, actually it's a close, large donors and small donors, and so on. Similarly, if you look at giving what we can members, so people who pledged 10% of their income, that had year on year growth of about 20%, or 30%. Similarly, if you look at people engaging with effective altruism as a movement via conferences,

and so on, that is also growing really quite healthily. So I think the overall story is that, yeah, that was a huge hit, but the underlying ideas are very good. That means that maybe things are a little bit less in the public eye, but people are still being convinced by the importance of giving more and giving more effectively or using the

clear to do good.

“And I think that's got momentum all of it, too.”

Right. Well, let's talk about those pieces. For me, the biggest change in my life that I've described to effective altruism in general, I mean, this is, and you're influenced in particular, has been the pledge, and we're just deciding in advance to give a certain amount of money or a certain percentage of money, in

this case, you know, 10% of pre-tax earnings, just knowing that that, on some of that money isn't even mine, you know, when it comes in the door, because it's been pre-committed to causes that seem important, that's just an enormous kind of psychological change, and just a life benefit, and it's just, you know, we have discussed this with you before, but I mean, it's just fun and virtuous, and just it just seems good all the way around.

The places where I remain uncertain whether E.A. has all the wisdom it should have to inform the conversation is around just what constitutes effectiveness, and how we think about that way. Like the list of causes that are on the menu, if you're E.A. versus, you know, causes that are almost by definition, not on the menu.

I think you're in your current thinking, you're arguing that we should expand the footprint of philanthropic targets beyond what is traditionally thought of as obvious E.A. causes. People just start there, so when people think about effect of altruism and its causes, what is the short list of causes that are obviously on the menu?

Yeah, so firstly, thanks for bringing up your 10% pledge, and one of the amazing things

looking back at, you know, the last 10 years, including from our first podcast was 10 years ago, was the impact that you take in the pledge and being public about it as had, where we're now up to 1200-10% pledges that have come from people who follow this podcast, over 30 million dollars of donations have moved, so we're talking about thousands of lives saved there.

Which is pretty cool. Yeah. Hopefully we have an undone. Those benefits were something else I've done on the podcast. I think it's good.

Yeah.

So a huge one is global health and development.

“And still, that's where most of the philanthropic money that gets directed goes.”

So just maybe I'll touch each of these as you send it over the net. The obvious cynical retort to the wisdom of that is people should be more concerned about suffering that's close to home, you know, America is going to retrenching now under the influence of not just the orange menace in the Oval Office, but lots of people who, if they weren't E.A. they were E.A. adjacent in Silicon Valley, I mean, all of the tech

bros who kind of went MAGA are to my eye at least building a kind of iron wall of cynicism against many of the values that, you know, you've just begun to articulate and one brick in this wall, certainly this notion that philanthropy doesn't really work, you know, sending money to Africa is just kind of foolish. It's, you know, you might be helping people, some identifiable people, but I mean, we've

really dozed all this so effectively now under the wisdom of E.L. and his insell cult that, you know, we just saw that all of this, these are all just all criminals who were wasting our money over there with USAID, the money should be used at home and it should be used for the most part, I mean philanthropy is just a boom dog, it should be just building businesses that are effective and solving problems that we want to solve and this seems to be the

genius of Silicon Valley and it's top people now. So this first claim that global health is such an obvious target and that the differential value of every dollar over there is so much more than it is here that, you know, you can do so much more good with a single dollar in Sub-Saharan Africa than you can do it

“in Mennel Park, but there's the argument, but what do you say in the face of the cynicism?”

Yeah, I mean, I think this lies in cynicism is a terrible shame and in fact, I think it will probably result in hundreds of thousands or millions of lives lost. So here are some things that are true, building companies. Let me just, sorry, it interrupts you again, but let me just add that you might have seen

the Lancet study that suggests that Elon's dismantling of USAID will cost 14 million people to

die unnecessarily in the next five years from infectious disease of 4.5 million of whom are under the age of five. Now, I mean, those numbers, I think I may have admit my life that the tech bros will be, you know, frankly, incredulous when they hear those numbers, but let's discount them by a factor of 10. I mean, let's say it's only 1.4 million people, 450,000 under the age of five, right? There's still enough people. Mind boggling numbers. Yeah, exactly. And so it's true that

building companies can be a great way of improving the world. It's also true that much aid can be ineffective, even sometimes harmful. That is just not true for the most effective global health and development interventions, which have saved hundreds of millions of lives over the course of the last 50 years, even the leading aid skeptics like Billy Stilly will proactively say, of course, are not talking about global health. That has had enormous benefits. And when you look at the most

effective organizations, you can show with high quality evidence, randomized controlled files that these save lives. And in fact, the donations that have gone via give will have saved hundreds of thousands, best guess, over 340,000 lives now. This is at a cost of about $5,000 per life, where there's in the United States, a typical, or, you know, good cost, low cost to give

“someone one year of life is about $50,000. So you're looking at kind of in the United States,”

giving someone an extra month of life for $5,000, or saving a child's life for $5,000 in a poor other country. Right. Right. Okay, so global health, what it was the next. An ex-big one is

animal welfare, in particular, farm animal welfare, where every year, about 90 billion animals

are raised in fact, the farms and slaughtered. And the conditions they live in are at truly resources. These are the worst off animals in the world. Such that, in fact, I think, when those animals die, that's the best thing that happened to them because they're alive, so full of such stuff. And there are things we can do to have enormous impact. So organizations within the kind of broader effect of altruism ecosystem, championed and then funded to cope that cage for the campaigns,

going to big retailers and restaurant chains and advocating for them to cut out the use of eggs from cage heads. And there were many pledges to do so 92% of those pledges have been fulfilled. Now, every year in the United States alone, there are three billion chickens that would have been brought up in cage confinement that instead have at least somewhat significantly better lives.

tens of millions of dollars for these campaigns. So if you're concerned about the well-being of

nonhuman animals and what are the just worst off creatures in the planet? Well, the amount of impact

“you can have per life there is just absolutely enormous. I think that, factally farming is one of”

the worst atrocities that humanity is committing today. And sadly, it's getting worse every year. But we can make this extraordinarily large impact on it in absolute terms. So yes, so this, this is one area where perhaps my own cynicism creeps in. I worry that any focus on suffering beyond human suffering, it risks confusing enough people so as to damage people's commitment to these principles. So I mean, I'm not the zero defensive factory farming coming from me here, but when I see a

philosopher who's clearly, you know, EA or EA adjacent, arguing on behalf of the welfare of shrimp

and claiming that maybe, you know, maybe the worst atrocity perpetrated by humans is all of the the mistreatment of shrimp because they exist in such numbers and lives such charitable lives. One imagines, though I don't really have strong intuitions about what it's like to be a shrimp.

“I just feel like those kinds of arguments, and this is what kind of the kind of vegan”

dogmatism can come in like that you can occasionally find a vegan as arguing that we need to actually do something with the state of nature, so they'll protect the rabbits from the foxes, kind of arguments. This begins to look like a reductive at absurdum of just the whole enterprise, which I'm just like, okay, okay, you know, I feel like people then declare on some of ethical bankruptcy, they say like, oh, I'm just going to worry about me and my family and my friends

and figure out what to do on the weekends because these philosophers have gone crazy. They're telling me that I have to worry about shrimp now. And I worry that the same thing is now in the office and we'll talk about this when we talk about AI, when we start talking about the possible suffering of digital minds. Now, I'm not actually prejudging the intellectual case. You can make for the plausible suffering of shrimp or the likely suffering of some digital minds, but

or you know, if not now in the future. But I just think if we're going to push the conversation to a place where we're asking people to care about how Nvidia's latest chips feel, you know, in some configuration, it's going to be, again, whatever is true, many agnostic as to what is true

or will be true once we build more powerful AI, I'm just thinking even the Dalai Lama is not

going to be able to shed a tear about digital minds. That's an epistemological boundary out,

“but even if it's not epistemological, it's, I think it's an emotional boundary for most people,”

at least for the longest time. Okay, great. So lots to unpack there. And so I actually personally, I'm not convinced by the Shlimp argument, but the thing I want to defend is people really taking ethical, including quite weird, seeming ethical ideas, seriously, and find a reason that through for themselves where perhaps, you know, there are some groups which should be just really thinking about PR and how ideas will be received and kind of kind of build some kind of broad coalition on

that basis. But I think some people just need to be trying to figure out just actually where the suffering is model theality at the moment, what might be we be missing. So there's this historical period that I got very obsessed with, you know, lighting my last book, which is the early Quakers, which led to the British abolitionist movement. It actually led to abolition of the slave trade and then of slave owning globally, in fact, for shadow slavery. And boy, those people will

weird early on, like at the time, I mean, the idea that it would be a model to own slaves was the guarded as last of all. Let alone, many of them were vegetarian and that's just a research. What next, they'll be saying that women should have the vote. They should be pacifists, which they also were. And looking back at ideas that we now take out, now think of as utterly morally common sense, like equal rights for women or like the attitude that's utterly a model to own slaves.

Now, learn completely absurd things like men having sex with men or something. These are things you would have been mocked for, maybe even the god it is kind of the pulse, you know, a populace for suggesting. You can also add to that the picture that was given to us by Descartes and others that, you know, animals as complex as dogs and apes, it could experience no pain, right? So they would just give a sect dogs by nailing their feet to boards and then just

performing, you know, surgery on them while alive. Yeah, or even touch things cats for entertainment and it was recently popular practice. Yeah. So we have this long-to-backed record of humanity getting malality along really quite badly. And those people who pushed early on are those changes

really trying to figure this out. And maybe that means that lots of people will say, okay, I'm

into effective giving, but not effective after some outcomes with all this baggage. And then I'm like, I don't really mind about labels. I don't really mind it. There may be, yeah, that other people can just take some parts and leave others, but I think this kind of cold run of ideas and intellectual and like model exploration and seriousness, including when it comes to aesthetic ideas,

“like, shrimp or like digital minds or perhaps something else. I think is something important and”

something I, you know, I really would like to protect and affect. Right. Okay, so you kind of global health and animal welfare, what else is canonical, yeah. Yeah, so another is pandemic for the Padness, which, you know, again, inviting us both and thinking about the last 10 years when I was

first on the podcast, you know, we have these more speculative areas, like pandemic for Padness,

like we know that's going to happen. Exactly. On either counts. Yeah. And, you know, that's something I'm personally particularly excited about because it's just the things that we can do, a so slam dunk. Mm-hmm. And even despite a pandemic that killed tens of millions of people, caused trillions of dollars of damages. You know, what sort of lessons did the world learn? Maybe we people became more skeptical of vaccines. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. There are things that could absorb, you know, take a lot of money, not enormous amounts globally, but hundreds of millions to billions. We could have mask stockpiles. We could build and deploy lighting that kind of sterilizes the air. Often these things look good even if you're just concerned about the economic impacts of colds. Right. Right. We could be monitoring wastewater for any sort of new viruses. These protect against regular, normal pandemics, like we've seen

throughout history. But they also protect against novel pandemics where we have the ability now to create and build new viruses, new pathogens. At the moment, that ability is constrained to people with sufficient skills in, you know, handful of labs. But the equipment needed to do so is getting, is not that expensive and it's getting cheaper all the time. The knowledge needed to do so is becoming more and more democratized. And this is something that we really want to get ahead of,

because it's really not that unlikely to me, maybe I'd say one in three, that we will just see waves and waves of new pandemics as a result of people tinkering with viruses in there,

you know, ultimately in their basement and it leaking out. So you're imagining just like

“endless lab leaks or you're imagining that plus biological terrorism. I think the most likely”

thing is lab leaks where obviously this is big debate about COVID, but let's just put that to the side. Leaks of viruses from labs are just extremely common. In fact, they average, I think for every hundred person years of people working in at least the highest security labs of virus leaks out. So in the United Kingdom, the foot in mouth disease, which I remember from a kid seeing just millions of like cow cocks as being burned. That was because of a that was the result of a lab leak.

Right. With the same lab, in fact, leaked the virus two weeks after getting recommended for it's actually just very hard to contain viruses and so small mistakes can lead to leaks. But yeah, it could be that. But in even worse case scenarios, yeah, biotech ever attacks or just the threats of that. So North Korea could have a lot more bargaining power on the world stage if it could credibly say and is in fact less enough to say, well, I have these bioweapons. We could

at least them. Yes, we would suffer mass casualties too, but you know, I'm the dictator. I don't mind somewhere. Okay. Well, so what else is on the list beyond pandemics now? Yeah. And then the biggest one, I would say is a kind of final category. Though there are many other categories too, including kind of scientific development, scientific innovation, certain kind of plug-loath, like sensible plug-loath policy making as well. But there's issues around AI, where again,

this has been a worry for many years, was the guarded as, you know, when I vote doing good better, utterly sci-fi, you know, something for the year 21 hundreds has been held out for

“change. Yeah. I mean, I still remember that. Well, like when I gave my AI talk at TED, which was exactly”

10 years ago, I remember, I mean, I just, as a kind of rhetorical device, just said for arguments, like, let's say we're not going to get there for 50 years, right? But well, I remember when I said that, I wasn't predicting that timeframe, but it seemed totally plausible to think it might take 50 years. There's no one talking in terms of 50 years as far as I can tell now. Yeah, exactly. And I was the same. I was just had these huge avabas on when AI could come and it's been a lot

this stat that as of like 2022 AI researchers forecast that it wouldn't be until it was something

“like, you know, 5% or 2% of AI researchers thought that AI would win the math Olympiad in, like,”

by, like, 2025, I mean, it was just not totally outlier position, but that's exactly what happened. Yeah, exactly. So both machine learning experts and forecasters have all been taken by supplies, by just how fast progress has been, in particular, on the means of the literature of these names, so mathematics, coding, and so on. And we're now in this very strange situation, we're actually the progress in AI capabilities is the markedly stable over time, which is what I would

say, stable, economical, stable exponential progress, where there are gains in how much computing power,

are just being phone AI for training, for experimentation, for infants, there are gains in algorithmic

efficiency, so how much of a punch can you get from that computing power. And then when you look at how does AI perform, whether that's on benchmarks or in terms of the time horizon of human equivalent tasks, so a task that might take a human three minutes or 30 minutes or three hours, that just occupies this relatively smooth exponential trend, where at the moment AI for software engineering can do tasks that a human would typically take a few hours to do, that seems to be doubling

something like every four to six months, so in, you know, think about it a year's time, maybe you've got AI that can do what would take a human a week, year after that will be a month, and so on. And so that really changes the dynamic of how to think about AI, well as 10 years ago it's much more based on kind of abstract arguments, how to agent, spave, and so on, in general, now we can do experiments on AI systems to get a sense of how they act,

what the best potential benefits are, and we can have a lot more confidence than we used to be able to have on when certain capabilities are coming, and in particular, the really scary point and time is when the AI loop feeds back on itself, and you are able to automate by AI, the process of doing AI of a search itself, and that a good argument and my organization has done some kind of deep dive investigation into this question for thinking that you get this big leap forward

“and capability at that point of time. All right, we're going to jump into AI in a minute that I think”

there'll be the entire second half of our conversation, but you used to phrase a moment ago the caught my attention, you said something about positive growth or it just said flag for me that it's almost invariably our discussion about ethics and our discussion about EA in particular is kind of negatively valence, we're just talking about the risks that need to be mitigated,

the suffering that needs to be alleviated, but there's this other side of the question always

when we're talking about human flourishing, we also need to think about the positive goods that remain unactualized, and a failure to actualize them is also another cost, and I think you're going to, I think I've seen people argue that it's in many respects, it could be a larger

“cost, I mean there's a, I think there's an asymmetry in our thinking and in our experience where”

we're suffering gets weighted more heavily, I mean, it's which is to say that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good, right, however you want to grammatically finish that sentence, but I do have the one you think about what's possible for us on the good side of the ledger and how we know nothing about the horizons of the good really, I mean how good could human life be, and how can we wait the opportunity costs of the present, I mean the things we're

doing now that prevent us from actually exploring the deeper reaches of human flourishing and the ability to make a society that allows for us to spend time there as opposed to just putting out fires and figuring out how not to kill one another, that's also part of the calculus. Absolutely, so Medson often has this idea that it just wants to restore normal functioning and the point of Medson is to, if someone is below normal, we'll get them back to normal, but it doesn't

care at all about going from normal to very good, so you're not going to be in the Olympics, we just want to get you out of bed. Yeah, except what counts as normal functioning obviously changes over time, and it is true, I think, that in the world today for present day people, you can often

well-being, but that's a contingent fact, and I do think that future generations will look back

at our lives today and think, oh my god, they missed out, they didn't have good and then insert goods like X and Y and Z in the same way as, you know, take our lives and imagine a different society

“where no one experienced love, and you'd think, well, that's how impoverished that society would”

be because of this absence of a good, and so I do think that when we're looking towards the future, we should be trying to think, yeah, not merely just how can we eliminate obvious causes of suffering, but actually how can we perhaps have a life that's, you know, that is better today than today, where the best days in my life are hundreds of times better than a typical day. I would like more of that,

I would like more of that for everyone. All right. Yeah, so I do think in those terms a lot when I

when I look at the kinds of things that capture our attention, certainly in politics these days, I do view almost everything as an opportunity cost, and so this actually brings me back to my initial question and concern around EA in, in specifying how we think about effectiveness, I mean, so EA and EA is effectiveness, effective altruism, and insofar as there's a bias toward the quantifiable and a bias toward hitting the targets that we just described, things like global health or

pandemic risk, et cetera, or just existential risk, more generally. I worry that we're sort of blind to obvious problems that are, you know, the intervention into which would be hard to quantify certainly in advance, but they're blocking everything. I mean, like if you could imagine a project that would have, you know, this doesn't even sound like an expensive one, but if we could have done something in advance to have a not related the tech bros/manosphere podcasters against the

charms of Trump and Trumpism, right? I mean, you know, it's like the Joe Rogan and the all-in podcasters, and Theo Vaughan and all these guys who put Trump on for hours at a stretch and didn't ask him a single skeptical question and just normalize his idiocy and dishonesty for a vast audience,

“I mean, I think it's not too much to think that that, you know, this is the only one by whatever”

1.5 percent, that was a, you know, among the many things that perhaps over-determined his victory,

that was one of those things, and there you wouldn't have had to, and then you just look at what an opportunity cost our current politics and, you know, America's current retreat from the world are disavowl of value. I mean, all of the values we're talking about in this podcast, America as a country has completely disavowed them. I mean, we don't, we don't care what other nations do. We would certainly don't care about climate change. I mean, there might be five people on Earth

now that we have the bandwidth to think about climate change. We don't care about nuclear proliferation, and I think we're, you know, our retreat from the world is going to usher in a new era of that, so that if you're talking about existential risk, you know, that seems like a bad thing. The, I mentioned Elon and his dozen, you know, if the Lancet is even remotely right over how many people will needlessly die as a result of that alone. I mean, that, that's again, that was all

downstream of a bunch of dummies talking to Trump in ways that could have easily been prevented if they only knew to prevent them. But like, that's not a project if, you know, it's not the most realistic thing that you would target with philanthropy, but it is the kind of thing that, you know,

“if you could have gotten your hands around that lever, that's arguably more important than”

anything that's on give wells website right now, right, given the opportunity costs. We're looking at the unraveling of American values and American politics. So I just, I'm wondering how you think about being charitable and allocating resources in the context of problems that's often have that shape, just like, you know, the shape of what social media is doing to us and the, and the our capacity to walk right about it and to solve any problem.

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