[rw]

Eliezer, to you, how does the fight against aging compare with the fight against poverty or the fight against war? Is it just a matter of scale? These concerns of yours, while pressing to us lucky few, seem to sidestep the urgent problems faced by the rest of the world: insecure access to food, shelter, healthcare, and education.

[Eliezer]

One must acquire the habit of thinking on the margins. If there are millions of people and billions of dollars attacking problem A which kills millions of people, and dozens of people and hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking problem B which kills millions of people, ceteris paribus your next marginal dollar is likely to have a bigger impact on B.

With that said, my own efforts are going into AI, not aging; the negative side of AI (recursive self-improvement by an agent with non-human-aligned goals) is something that, for all we know in this epistemic state, could happen at literally any time (hidden NSA lab finally achieved AI a month ago, it improved to superintelligence a week ago, cracked the protein folding problem, emailed some DNA strings to protein synthesis labs, got nanotechnology an hour ago, whoops we're all dead).

So if you're one of those people for whom problems don't exist unless they at least might destroy your self of tomorrow and not just your self of thirty years from now, I actually am spending my time on one of those problems.

But mostly I regard immediate temporal proximity as an invalid constraint on philanthropy.

[rms]

I think the answer is that we can worry about those problems once we solve the problem of not accidentally destroying humanity.