Yes, and it's heavily funded by EA givers (yours truly included). People like to harp on the weird edge-cases, but Givewell.org is directing hundreds of millions of dollars per year[0], and it's pretty much entirely things deworming, malaria prevention, etc.[1]
If you visit effectivealtruism.org you'll see it's not a bunch of articles about AI research. It's about convincing people to donate in ways that have the most positive impact, and includes a big "What has the effective altruism community done?" section that's mostly the standard "ensure everyone has food, water, basic healthcare, etc." The key is that there's an emphasis on making sure you're actually improving those metrics as much as possible, rather than whatever has the flashiest marketing.
There are a bunch of people talking about AI safety and other weirder things, but we mostly just look at research to figure out what improves lives and do that.
If that's the most effective way of helping people, why would they not do that? They do more than that though, they fund projects of many different kinds. They also coach people to go into fields where they can have a positive impact for example.
> wasn't one of their initial proposals that deworming medications should be sent to rural Africa, for its disproportionate impact it could have?
They have different funds:
- Global Health and Development Fund [0]
- Animal Welfare Fund [1]
- Long-Term Future Fund[2]
- Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund[3]
Deworming would go under "Global health and development" (if it's estimated to be the most effective) and AI under "Long-term future fund".
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0. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/global-development
1. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare
I’d be very shocked if AI research got more than 5% of EA funding.
(I should note, I donate a decent sum to GiveWell each year, though only to the Global Development fund, and it deeply irks me that they don't put some of their effort into innovative ideas to combat climate change)
This is really the kind of comment I'd like not to see on HN.
"Neckbeard concern" implies that... what, people worrying about AI risk are worrying for fun? Because they're socially awkward nerds disconnected from reality?
This reminds me of https://xkcd.com/743/
Worrying about the future consequences of incoming technological developments always looks like "neckbeard concerns" until it's too late to do anything about it.
And thus he we are, worrying about climate change and supply chain sovereignty and corporate control of information and wondering why nobody took sensible measures 20 years ago.
> And there's no mention of anything this org has actually done to help anyone, other than getting people to donate
Note that this is an internal post from an individual suggesting organizational changes, not an official public-facing communication.
As sibling comments pointed out, they do have posts listing success stories.
I'm sure just because of the nature of the movement there's been lots of thinking about the likelihood of various future scenarios and accounting for this in less flippant terms than I've just described it, but it seems to me that this is a group of people who are skewed to think AI is more likely, more potentially dangerous, and more interesting to work on and fund.
Putting aside the likelihood of AGI materializing at all, it's not really clear to me that paying for a bunch of research on this necessarily affects the actual AI that would be produced anyway, as that's being done by different people with different interests and incentives. You see people discuss the numbers of people affected by something like malaria prevention versus eventual extinction at the hands of AI as a justification for the need for AI work, but less talk about how we actually know what kinds of things we can do to do malaria prevention and really not so much the AI stuff. Obviously you have to start somewhere but...
From an outsider's perspective, the whole area just kind of feels like a pit you can throw money into while pretending you're being rigorous about spending.
But this is a criticism about effectiveness made within an EA framework. It assumes the thing we want to do is maximize the amount of good we do with our resources, and provides rational arguments for why AI won’t do that.
The AI folks think their cause is the one that does the most good, and they have rational arguments for that position. That’s why they’re considered part of the EA movement (despite not fitting in with the original vision).
That also means we have to listen and provide counterarguments before we reject their position. What we definitely shouldn’t do is write them off as “neckbeards” just because they’re working in tech and have unusual concerns. That’s how you end up writing off some 1930s physicist worried about the existential risk of nuclear fission weapons as some “Weird neckbeard nerd.”
There are hotfixes people add on for edge cases like "don't label people as gorillas" or "don't say certain words that Nazis say", but for problems like "don't ever initiate a conversation likely to cause someone to commit suicide"... there's no foundational work (that's not super vague) that compels an AI to optimize for human success and life.
That's not great IMO, and we should probably dedicate as much money to it as we dedicate to, I dunno, potato chips ($65 billion a year in the US IIRC).