I loved Phoebe’s Updates from the Swarm and George’s Alone again: facing the possibility of AI takeover as the world sleepwalks on. I think it’s a good time for sharing big feelings, so here’s an essay which rhymes with theirs. I drafted most of it in 2022, which was also a time of big feelings for me.
I grew up in a small town surrounded by good people. My mum stayed at work late to help women through labour and my dad really tried to lead the Rotary Club in helping our community.
I had some general sense that there was more that we should do about helping others in low-income countries, but I was young and the world was complicated, and I hadn’t figured all of that out yet.
When my friend Dan introduced me to The Life You Can Save, I saw a clear argument that our lack of action to help those folks meant that each of the good people around me was allowing tens, and often hundreds, of people to die through inaction.
It seemed like the most important truth I had ever come across. But when I talked to people about it they scarcely changed anything about their lives.
I spent a few years feeling frustrated and dumbfounded by this – I just couldn’t understand how the clarity of argument here wasn’t enough to motivate major changes in the kind people around me.
***
Over time, I refined my understanding of people.
I learned about signalling, status quo bias, absurdity heuristics, scope insensitivity, and so on. Gradually the broad picture of humanity’s actions made more sense.
We’re not best understood as ‘moral agents who act to look after the welfare of others’, but as a grab-bag of moral and amoral drives. Those drives were selected because they helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, and each of them gets dialled up or down depending on context. Most people spend their time acting according to those drives, instead of working to act consistently on their stated values.
Those drives often lead to motivated reasoning, anger, rejection of uncertainty, and tribalism. They served our genes well in the past. But the modern world is immensely complex, it’s full of economic and game-theoretic pressures, and it has enormous engineering and scientific power. So the same old drives are now playing a changed game, and the stakes are much higher.
Within that new understanding, none of these are puzzles:
- Most people eat animals raised in factory farms.
- Most people give <5% of their income to charity, and make ~no focused effort to find the best ones or check whether their reasons for not giving more are valid.
- The world is collectively choosing to not spend 1–2% of its resources to prevent climate change.
- Some people work on technologies which they believe may destroy the world.
- My parents bought a catamaran, instead of giving in to my frustrated pleas and giving the money to anti-malarial bed nets (saving >10 people’s lives).
Sometimes I’m in a mindset which extends compassion and love to all beings. When I’m there, people behaving like that seems almost impossible to relate to.
But then, at other times, I can see in my own ape brain the motivations that lead to every single one.
***
It’s more pleasant to feel curiosity about what motivates people than to feel outrage at what they’re missing.
I don’t manage to feel like that all the time though.
Right now, there are a few thousand people racing towards the production of a technology with a >10% chance of killing us, killing our children, destroying ~everything we care about, and I’m… Yeah, I’m pissed off again.
I really want us to be better.
***
I know that this isn’t everything that humanity is.
We really are capable of great courage, love, and kindness, and of questioning our own motivations and trying to be better.
People have formed movements and communities to try to make the world better. Sometimes, these have been really important – like environmentalism, feminism, or the scientific revolution.
The one I’m most trying to contribute to, Effective Altruism, has a better shot than most at seriously helping.
We’re smart, interested in strategic improvements, reasonably well coordinated, well resourced, growing, and we are really trying.
Through this community, I’ve been able to find teammates who I love and trust. They make me feel less alone and less powerless when I look at these problems.
***
We find ourselves here together at the hinge of history.
On one side is disaster. On the other is a utopia which is better than what most people have ever conceived. A world without starvation, slaughter, or biological ageing. One in which there are beings who get to understand the mysteries of the universe more deeply than my mind will ever be able to, and have lives full of adventure and joy and meaning.
We could get there. We could use what we’ve learned over the last hundred years about game theory, coordination, economics, governance, the nature of consciousness, and technology to create a future which is wondrous.
I don’t know that we will. Humanity isn’t what I thought it was when I was a kid.
But I’m going to fight to help get us there, and I feel awfully grateful to have teammates who I love and trust fighting alongside me.
