Why is there a "long term future" fund addressing the theoretical risk of AI but not the very well understood and documented future risks of climate change?
The Long-Term future fund is designed to be fairly broad at some point, and it may well support some climate change initiatives in the future, as well as addressing potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, and any other potential global catastrophic risks. Nick Beckstead has previously expressed interest in funding more research to quantify the tail risks associated with runaway climate change in particular.
Having said that, one of the reasons that EA has not focused as heavily on climate change historically is that climate change is not as neglected as potential risks from AI, or biotechnology. We are happy to see a lot of funding going into climate research and modelling, and a lot of grassroots activism. While climate change is far from solved, and remains one of the most important problems of our time, many EAs think that we should first focus on problems which receive less media attention but are plausibly just as serious.
That doesn't mean there's nothing neglected in climate change (e.g. negative emissions technology) and it would be good to see some more investigation into this.
> many EAs think that we should first focus on problems which receive less media attention but are plausibly just as serious.
How is that effective? How could you even measure the effectiveness of focusing on problems that don't currently exist but that you happen to consider "plausible"? (Global warming, in contrast, is quite measurable.)
I'm looking at the list of recipients of that fund and it looks like self-dealing: people on the futurist side of EA would like to encourage people to donate to people on the futurist side of EA.
The Long-Term Future Fund is for ensuring the continued survival and flourishing of future generations. Climate change is one future risk, but there are many others — including ensuring that the risks posed by smarter-than-human artificial intelligence are understood and mitigated, but also e.g. mitigating pandemic risk from genetically engineered pathogens.
As with all the Funds, choosing organisations to grant to will involve asking questions about scale, crowdedness, and tractability (how big is the problem, how many people are already working on the problem, and how hard is the problem to solve). For more on this see [1],[2].
Climate change is clearly an important future risk, but it's a very hard problem to solve (requiring massive international cooperation), and there are already lots of people working in this space (while I wouldn't necessarily agree that all future risks of climate change are 'very well understood' because of nonlinearities in modelling complex systems, part of the reason it's well-documented is because there has been considerable research effort expended over the last 20-30 years). By contrast, there are many future risks that have less attention, but may have similarly severe consequences for future generations. It's important we aren't blindsided by one of these risks just because we have a better understanding of one particular area.
To be clear, none of the above precludes that the Fund could donate to orgs working on climate change research/mitigation/prevention, just that there might be reasons to look at other risks as well, even if they're less well understood.
Having said that, one of the reasons that EA has not focused as heavily on climate change historically is that climate change is not as neglected as potential risks from AI, or biotechnology. We are happy to see a lot of funding going into climate research and modelling, and a lot of grassroots activism. While climate change is far from solved, and remains one of the most important problems of our time, many EAs think that we should first focus on problems which receive less media attention but are plausibly just as serious.