If your AI work doesn’t ground out in reducing the risk of extinction, I think animal welfare work quickly becomes the more impactful than anything AI. Xrisk reduction can be through more indirect channels, of course, though indirectness generally increases speculativeness of the xrisk story.
There are many ways to reduce existential risk. I don’t see any good reason to think that reducing small chances of extinction events is better EV than reducing higher chances of smaller catastrophes, or even just building human capacity in preferentially non-destructive way. The arguments that we should focus on extinction have always boiled down to ‘it’s simpler to think about’.
If your AI work doesn’t ground out in reducing the risk of extinction, I think animal welfare work quickly becomes the more impactful than anything AI. Xrisk reduction can be through more indirect channels, of course, though indirectness generally increases speculativeness of the xrisk story.
There are many ways to reduce existential risk. I don’t see any good reason to think that reducing small chances of extinction events is better EV than reducing higher chances of smaller catastrophes, or even just building human capacity in preferentially non-destructive way. The arguments that we should focus on extinction have always boiled down to ‘it’s simpler to think about’.