|
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. For more on research into effective giving opportunities in climate change, see https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/cause/climate-change/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67oL0ANDh5Y
[2] https://80000hours.org/2014/01/which-cause-is-most-effective... |
What makes you think that AI risk is a tractable problem, or even a well-defined one?