| Hence, they point out that focusing on superintelligence gets you a way bigger bang for your buck than, say, preventing people who exist right now from contracting malaria by distributing mosquito nets. The article seems to push for a narrative that effective altruism encourages ignoring current problems in favor of Super Science Future Hooey, but this quote brings up something important. Mosquito nets are one of the most often suggested effective interventions in EA circles. Highly rated organizations like the Against Malaria Foundation focus on them. It's been one of GiveWell's top charities for a long time: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities There are people who consider themselves effective altruists concerned with existential risks, however the article focuses on one logical extreme of analysis: Well, just crunch the numbers: 0.00000000001 percent of 1023 people is 10 billion people, which is ten times greater than 1 billion people. While you do sometimes see analyses like these, they're more often used as intuition pumps and in stress testing ethical frameworks than anything else. If someone were to try to use something like the above in an argument, it would likely just become an unpersuasive Pascal's Mugging. In reality, you can make an overwhelming case for paying attention to existential risk while valuing 'potential' lives at precisely zero. It turns out that 'everyone who exists now, dies' is pretty bad, and many of the potential existential threats have nonnegligible probability. Civilizational threats are even more likely, and still extremely bad. Articles like this would make sense to me if the government was preparing to throw trillions of dollars at speculative 'longtermist' problems based on low probability/high impact arguments, but they're not. Instead, we see massive underinvestment even given a valuation of potential humans at zero. I want to avoid a path where effective altruism- which, at its core, is just people trying to do a better job of doing good, through many different paths- becomes some political football or ammunition in a culture war. This kind of article seems to be really trying to do that. |