This is part 1 of what I expect to be a 3-part series. The next parts will focus on the costs of these technical projects and more specific ways to kickstart them.

Meta

Rigor: Writing based on my experiences and education in the tech industry. I spent around 50 hours on this series plus some sporadic thinking and discussion. I focused more on idea quantity than neatness or data.

Intended Audience: Effective altruists interested in either funding or working on ambitious software projects.

History: This series was originally written as one Google Doc in March 2021 for private conversations. I've since done some updating to post it publicly. One important update since this document was written is that the CEA tech team has seemed to really up hiring considerably. This seems great, though I'm sure we could have even more, so it still seemed useful to post this.

About me (Ozzie Gooen):
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last several years. I joined 80,000 Hours as a web developer in 2013 hoping to do major/ambitious work, but there I realized that the funding situation at the time wasn’t large enough for most ambitious software efforts. I’ve since spent time in other startups, making my own startups, and doing consulting for small and large companies.

Recently I’ve been planning what work QURI should do. We’re considering focusing on engineering. Some of the motivation for this topic is to help make decisions for QURI.

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Aaron Gertler, Rachel Bui, JP Addison, Daniel Kokotajlo, Adam Gleave, Daniel Eth, Oliver Habryka, Jonas Vollmer, and Nuño Sempere for their comments.

Motivation

When I think of,

There’s an elite community with a net worth of over $40 Billion, made up of many genius mathematicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs and they’re trying to optimize the future of the world

I think of things like this:

Lots of monitors https://www.vssmonitoring.com/best-monitor-for-trading/

(From Iron Man 2)

Right now we clearly don’t have this. Open Philanthropy and other core effective altruism organizations are highly philosophically focused as opposed to technically focused. This seems like a good beginning, but perhaps a suboptimal end.

Large technical implementations would be expensive ($10 Million to $100 Million+ per year). They would be different from current setups in some key ways. But I think they could be worth it.

Perhaps the best analogy woul...

Amibitous Altruistic Software Efforts