I agree that the cause prioritisation work we need to do now is far harder than the work we were doing ten years ago. I think AI Impacts provides an interesting illustration of that: It was initially set up essentially as a cause prioritisation org. But in doing that work it became clear that whereas in comparing between different global development interventions there was a large published literature to build on, when trying to compare work on AI to other areas, and compare interventions within AI safety, there was far less to go on. That led to the conclusion that the work they should do first was get a better grasp on questions like ‘how fast will AI likely develop, and how discontinuously?’.
I think another thing going on is that the stakes have become higher. When Giving What We Can first started publishing recommendations eg comparing between donating to education or deworming, we only had ~30 members. That’s a lot of money over people’s lifetimes, but it’s nowhere near the resources the EA movement now commands. The huge increase in resources to allocate makes it more worth doing the foundational work that groups like AI Impacts do, and also the theoretic work GPI does. I think that makes it look like there’s less work being done, because there are way fewer actionable results per hour spent.
I agree that the cause prioritisation work we need to do now is far harder than the work we were doing ten years ago. I think AI Impacts provides an interesting illustration of that: It was initially set up essentially as a cause prioritisation org. But in doing that work it became clear that whereas in comparing between different global development interventions there was a large published literature to build on, when trying to compare work on AI to other areas, and compare interventions within AI safety, there was far less to go on. That led to the conclusion that the work they should do first was get a better grasp on questions like ‘how fast will AI likely develop, and how discontinuously?’.
I think another thing going on is that the stakes have become higher. When Giving What We Can first started publishing recommendations eg comparing between donating to education or deworming, we only had ~30 members. That’s a lot of money over people’s lifetimes, but it’s nowhere near the resources the EA movement now commands. The huge increase in resources to allocate makes it more worth doing the foundational work that groups like AI Impacts do, and also the theoretic work GPI does. I think that makes it look like there’s less work being done, because there are way fewer actionable results per hour spent.