Hi Andreu. The EA Forum definitely has a lot of stuff about AI because that’s the hot topic to talk about, and it sure seems like a lot of people in the movement these days are focused on AI, but according to a survey in 2024, the top priority cause area for 29% of people in EA is global poverty and global health and the top priority for 31% of people is AI risk, so AI risk and global poverty/health are about tied — at least on that metric. (Another way of averaging the data from the same survey puts global poverty/health slightly ahead of AI risk.)
The last survey to ask where people in EA were donating is from way back in 2020. A whole lot has changed since 2020. For what it’s worth, 62% of respondents to that survey said they were donating to global health and development charities, 27% said animal welfare, and 18% said AI and “long term”.
The 2020 survey also found 16% of people named global poverty as their top cause, while 14% said AI risks. It’s interesting that this is true given where people said they donated in 2020. I would guess that’s probably because, regardless of which cause area you think is more important, it’s not clear where you would donate if you wanted to reduce AI risk, whereas with global poverty there are many great options, including GiveWell’s top charities. So, maybe even now, more people are donating to charities related to global poverty than to AI risk, but I don’t know about any actual data on that.
By the way, if you click “Customize feed” on the EA Forum homepage, you can reduce or fully hide posts about any particular topic. So, you could see fewer posts on AI or just hide them altogether, if you want.
Also, if you want to read posts expressing skepticism about AI risk, the forum has an “AI risk skepticism” tag that makes it easy to find posts about that. You have different options for sorting these posts that will show you different stuff. “Top” (the default) will mostly show you posts from years ago. “New & upvoted” will mostly show you posts from within the last year (including some of mine!).
Hi Yarrow, great analysis, that helps me have a clearer picture.
But the surveys and the Forum are two different datasets, it would be relatively easy to have a ‘real time’ tracking of the forum’s sentiments or do statistics from archival data to see how the trends are and how they map, or not, to survey results.
But still, a roughly 50% of top posts being about AI to a roughly 1⁄3 of people concerned about AI risks map quite well if you add the fad factor of AI.
Oh, it’s actually 86-96% who are concerned about AI risk, according to the 2024 survey. 31% was just the number of people who picked it as their top cause area.
Hi Andreu. The EA Forum definitely has a lot of stuff about AI because that’s the hot topic to talk about, and it sure seems like a lot of people in the movement these days are focused on AI, but according to a survey in 2024, the top priority cause area for 29% of people in EA is global poverty and global health and the top priority for 31% of people is AI risk, so AI risk and global poverty/health are about tied — at least on that metric. (Another way of averaging the data from the same survey puts global poverty/health slightly ahead of AI risk.)
The last survey to ask where people in EA were donating is from way back in 2020. A whole lot has changed since 2020. For what it’s worth, 62% of respondents to that survey said they were donating to global health and development charities, 27% said animal welfare, and 18% said AI and “long term”.
The 2020 survey also found 16% of people named global poverty as their top cause, while 14% said AI risks. It’s interesting that this is true given where people said they donated in 2020. I would guess that’s probably because, regardless of which cause area you think is more important, it’s not clear where you would donate if you wanted to reduce AI risk, whereas with global poverty there are many great options, including GiveWell’s top charities. So, maybe even now, more people are donating to charities related to global poverty than to AI risk, but I don’t know about any actual data on that.
By the way, if you click “Customize feed” on the EA Forum homepage, you can reduce or fully hide posts about any particular topic. So, you could see fewer posts on AI or just hide them altogether, if you want.
Also, if you want to read posts expressing skepticism about AI risk, the forum has an “AI risk skepticism” tag that makes it easy to find posts about that. You have different options for sorting these posts that will show you different stuff. “Top” (the default) will mostly show you posts from years ago. “New & upvoted” will mostly show you posts from within the last year (including some of mine!).
Hi Yarrow, great analysis, that helps me have a clearer picture.
But the surveys and the Forum are two different datasets, it would be relatively easy to have a ‘real time’ tracking of the forum’s sentiments or do statistics from archival data to see how the trends are and how they map, or not, to survey results.
But still, a roughly 50% of top posts being about AI to a roughly 1⁄3 of people concerned about AI risks map quite well if you add the fad factor of AI.
Oh, it’s actually 86-96% who are concerned about AI risk, according to the 2024 survey. 31% was just the number of people who picked it as their top cause area.
ah, oks, so the ‘Forum numbers’ are not as bad then related to that :), thks!