Yuval Harari: philanthropy principles + 3 AI-focused charities he recommends (7/4, link udpate)
Yuval Harari recently participated in a call to discuss philanthropy for those working in AI.
He produced this handout [edit: document updated by Harari] with some general principles for philanthropy and his three top charities for people working in AI.
They are:
- Karya (ethical data cooperative in India)
- LawZero (developing advanced non-agenic AI)
- AI Futures Project (forecasting AI’s future)
I will share this post with his office, so I would guess that he’ll see any detailed comments that anyone chooses to share.
For anyone reacting with “disagree,” feel free to explain why.
I imagine that Yuval will be interested in your thoughts, since he wrote the factsheet for EAs who are working on AI and then updated it when I offered to post it on the EA Forum.
I’m very far from working in the AI industry, so I don’t think I’m the target audience of this post.
In any case, as someone trying to use part of my resources to help others, I agree with much of it (especially points 1. 2. and 6.) but I personally strongly disagree with other points:
For people working in AI the potential harms of their work are immense, and involve most present and future life, so I think it’s reasonable to prioritize mitigating those harms, but I don’t think it’s a good general principle for the vast majority of givers.
Suppose an extreme scenario where I make billions of dollars developing a practical form of nuclear fusion, which quickly devalues fossil fuels. A large investor in fossil fuels loses a lot of money as a consequence, and has to cancel their $2M space tourism trip.
This is a clear harm to them directly caused by how I made my money. Why should my first priority as a philanthropist be to mitigate this harm, instead of preventing thousands of much poorer people losing a child from preventable disease?
More practically: most harms caused by most of our careers are local (e.g. if I become a doctor, someone else won’t get to be a doctor) and I think our priority in charity should be to help those that we can help the most, who usually are far removed from any effects of our careers.
I think giving to causes close to my heart is a very flawed moral guide which will predictably lead me to help fewer people and help them less. Largely because by default the issues closest to my heart would be problems like Parkinson’s disease that already receive a lot of resources, and with the same amount of resources I can help far more individuals far more, people who are suffering from issues I was born too lucky to ever see (e.g. tuberculosis kills 1.2 million people per year). Their suffering is just as real, and matters just as much. I think many great points raised by Paul Bloom in Against Empathy also apply here.
I do agree that ceteris paribus one should favor issues that are closer to one’s field of expertise, especially when able to identify particularly promising opportunities, but again, my field of expertise is unlikely to involve the world’s most neglected issues (almost by definition) and we should be mindful of that when evaluating funding opportunities.
I agree that there is a risk of trying to optimize charity too much. In practice I think the main risks are analysis paralysis, or feeling paralyzed by extreme cluelessness, and as a consequence donating much less than otherwise, or not at all.
But there is definitely also a risk of optimizing too little, and I worry that optimizing “a little” results in far fewer individuals being helped. It’s true that without crystal balls and a perfect measure of suffering you can’t be certain of whether a choice is optimific. But the same applies to choices people make in their own lives, where we all agree it’s rational to spend more than a little time comparing options.
E.g. If I were diagnosed with a serious medical issue with several treatment options with different risk profiles, nobody would tell me: “There is no perfect measure of health, and no crystal ball about complications, so just compare a little and then focus on getting some surgery.” People would advise me to get a second opinion, study the literature, compare hospitals and surgeons, ask for expert advice, and so on. None of this can guarantee the optimal result, but for things we care about, optimizing ‘a little’ is not enough, and when talking about charitable donations the stakes are extremely high. Unlike hospitals or recommended treatment options, some charities probably do 100x more good per dollar than others, so the returns to comparison are unusually large.
I also imagine that Harari and Sapienship spent quite a bit of time and research before shortlisting those 3 specific recommendations, so it’s likely we don’t actually disagree here.
Thanks for writing this up, Bruce!
I agree, seems very valuable to share, thank you!
I heard from Harari’s office, asking for a small update to the handout, so I updated the link.