This is a special post for quick takes by anoni. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Curated and popular this week
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Cross-posted to Lesswrong
Introduction
Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include:
1. Updates toward short timelines
2. The Trump presidency
3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm
4. Deepseek
5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending
6. Increased internal deployment
7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse
Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on.
In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!
Implications of recent developments
Updates toward short timelines
There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is that 99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months).
We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achi
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Hey everyone, I’ve been going through the EA Introductory Program, and I have to admit some of these ideas make sense, but others leave me with more questions than answers. I’m trying to wrap my head around certain core EA principles, and the more I think about them, the more I wonder: Am I misunderstanding, or are there blind spots in EA’s approach?
I’d really love to hear what others think. Maybe you can help me clarify some of my doubts. Or maybe you share the same reservations? Let’s talk.
Cause Prioritization. Does It Ignore Political and Social Reality?
EA focuses on doing the most good per dollar, which makes sense in theory. But does it hold up when you apply it to real world contexts especially in countries like Uganda?
Take malaria prevention. It’s a top EA cause because it’s highly cost effective $5,000 can save a life through bed nets (GiveWell, 2023). But what happens when government corruption or instability disrupts these programs? The Global Fund scandal in Uganda saw $1.6 million in malaria aid mismanaged (Global Fund Audit Report, 2016). If money isn’t reaching the people it’s meant to help, is it really the best use of resources?
And what about leadership changes? Policies shift unpredictably here. A national animal welfare initiative I supported lost momentum when political priorities changed. How does EA factor in these uncertainties when prioritizing causes? It feels like EA assumes a stable world where money always achieves the intended impact. But what if that’s not the world we live in?
Long termism. A Luxury When the Present Is in Crisis?
I get why long termists argue that future people matter. But should we really prioritize them over people suffering today?
Long termism tells us that existential risks like AI could wipe out trillions of future lives. But in Uganda, we’re losing lives now—1,500+ die from rabies annually (WHO, 2021), and 41% of children suffer from stunting due to malnutrition (UNICEF, 2022). These are preventable d
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Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way.
Summary
While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise:
1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015.
2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010.
3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.
I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.
Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.
Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.
Introduction
In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000:
Giving What We Can said that
> The reduction in malaria has be
TL;DR silly critics to long-termism, can you convince me to keep donating to EA funds?
See positive arguments and introduction below. The following are supposed to be naive Critics/questions:
Introduction:
Hi everyone! I have read some of the posts on long-termism. Maybe one hour of reading, which is obviously not enough given the time devoted and depth achieved by people around here. However, I still feel the idea is terrible, which is why I compiled the previous naive list to have each point refuted. I definitely don't like seeing the funds giving money to already privileged people (arguably more than me), but I trust there is a good reason behind. Please add a "IMO" before each phrase.
The most compelling pro arguments for long-termism investing are: 1- it makes sense for good investments to be counter-intuitive (because they are the most neglected and they wouldn't be neglected if they were intuitive) and 2- long-termism is more about the coincidence between the correctness of globally good actions and the correctness of those actions in the long term future.
Any Too Long Didn't Read - like answer will be very appreciated
Hi - my intuitions fall in the other direction here, so I'm keen to explain why. Implicit IMOs in front of everything here.
1:
1.1: I have a younger brother. My parents could have stopped at one, and my family would broadly still be happy, but my brother is generally happy and leads a good life. Similarly, if they'd had a third child they probably would have been happy and great too, and I would have loved them. All else being equal I wish that youngest sibling could have existed. IMO these two sentiments aren't meaningfully distinct.
1.2: We don't only care about humans. Sure, the argument for making more humans would apply to insects or something as well. However, most of the things that would kill all the humans would also kill everything else, so for me not letting that happen is still much more of a priority.
1.3: True on the specifics, false more generally. I don't know exactly what the world should look like, but I'm pretty sure people being happy is good, more people being happy is better, and everything being unrecoverably dead is neutral at most.
2:
2.1: If we weren't potentially about to all die I'd be more willing to think about this, but we have to survive the next century or two first. Whether capitalism makes things better or worse for now depends much more on whether it makes us more or less likely to all die, than on anything else (again, for now).
2.2: I'm pretty sure non-privileged people also want to be alive and happy.
2.3: Possibly, and I'm ok with that. I'd rather live a worse life if it means my grandkids are more likely to survive and have happy ones. Although it's definitely better for everyone to be happier now, I feel like it doesn't amount to much if we all die in the next century.
2.4: If I can choose between a surviving but stable society, and a growing one, I would choose the growing one. But both are better than an empty rock, so the priority now is not dying either way.
3:
3.1: I'm pretty sure we'll continue to want to be alive and happy, so false. People can't decide what their preferences are, and work to fulfil them, if they don't exist.
3.2: Our moral intuitions were built for very different-looking societies to where we are today. We like sugar and sex because we were supposed to go for fruit and reproduction; our moral intuitions aren't hugely different. IMO this is in a similar category to people caring more about saving one child than eight of them.
3.3: No.
I should clarify 3.3. For me, longtermism is partly the acknowledgement of much vaster moral stakes - so long as there are things we can do to help, they're no less important to do as short-termist interventions. (The usual arguments about it not being helpful to demand too much of people still apply though).
1.
1.1.: You might want to have a look at group of positions in metaethics called person affecting views, some of which include future people and some of which don't. The ones that do often don't care about increasing/decreasing the number of people in the future, but about improving the lives of future people that will exist anyway. That's compatible with longtermism - not all longtermism is about extinction risk. (See trajectory change and s-risk.)
1.2.: No, we don't just care about humans. In fact, I think it's quite likely that most of the value or disvalue will come from non-human minds. (Though I'm thinking digital minds rather than animals.) But we can't influence how the future will go if we're not around, and many x-risk scenarios would be quite bad full stop and not just bad for humans.
1.3.: You might want to have a look at cluelessness (EA forum and GPI website should have links) or the recent 80,000 Hours podcast with Alexander Berger. Predicting the future and how we can influence it is definitely extremely hard, but I don't think we're decisively in bad enough of a position where we can - with a good conscience - just throw our hands up and conclude there's definitely nothing to be done here.
2.
2.1 + 2.2.: Don't really want to write anything on this right now
2.3.: Definite no. It just argues that trade-offs must be made, and some bads are worse even than current suffering. Or rather: The amount of bad we can avert is greater even than if we focus on current suffering
2.4: Don't understand what you're getting at.
3.
3.1.: Can't parse the question
3.2.: I think many longtermists struggle with this. Michelle Hutchinson wrote a post on the EA forum recently on what still keeps her motivated. You can find it by searching her name ont he EA forum.
3.3.: No. Longtermism per se doesn't say anything about how much to personally sacrifice. You can believe in longtermism + think that you should give away your last penny and work every waking hour in a job you don't like. You can not be a longtermist and think you should live a comfortable, expensive life because that's what's most sustainable. Some leanings on this question might correlate with whether you're a longtermist or not, but in principle, this question is orthogonal.
Sorry if the tone is brash. If so, that's unintentional, and I tend to be really slow otherwise, but I appreciate that you're thinking about this. (Also, I'm writing this as sleep procrastination, and my guilt is driving my typing speed)