New releases

At 80,000 Hours, we are interested in the question: “if you want to find the best way to have a positive impact with your career, what should you do on the margin?” The ‘on the margin’ qualifier is crucial. We are asking how you can have a bigger impact, given how the rest of society spends its resources.

To help our readers think this through, we publish a list of what we see as the world’s most pressing problems. We rank the top most issues by our assessment of where additional work and resources will have the greatest positive impact, considered impartially and in expectation.

Every problem on our list is there because we think it’s very important and a big opportunity for doing good. We’re excited for our readers to make progress on all of them, and think all of them would ideally get more resources and attention than they currently do from society at large.

The most pressing problems are those that have the greatest combination of being:

• Large in scale: solving the issue improves more lives to a larger extent over the long run.
• Neglected by others: the best interventions aren’t already being done.
• Tractable: we can make progress if we try.

We’ve recently updated our list. Here are the biggest changes:

• We now rank factory farming among the top problems in the world.

This week we’re highlighting:

• Our new interview with Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks
• The Forecasting Research Institute’s report on its Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament results
• Our problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe

The idea this week: even some sceptics of AI risk think there’s a real chance of a catastrophe in the next 1,000 years.

That was one of many thought-provoking conclusions that came up when I spoke with economist Ezra Karger about his work with the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) on understanding disagreements about existential risk.

It’s hard to get to a consensus on the level of risk we face from AI. So FRI conducted the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament to investigate these disagreements and find out whether they could be resolved.

The interview covers a lot of issues, but here are some key details that stood out on the topic of AI risk:

• Domain experts in AI estimated a 3% chance of AI-caused human extinction by 2100 on average, while superforecasters put it at just 0.38%.
• Both groups agreed on a high likelihood of “powerful AI” being developed by 2100 (around 90%).
• Even AI risk sceptics saw a 30% chance of catastrophic AI outcomes over a 1,000-year timeframe.
• But the groups showed little convergence after extensive debate,

This week, we’re sharing new updates on:

1. Top career paths for reducing risks from AI
2. An AI bill in California that’s getting a lot of attention
3. The potential for catastrophic misuse of advanced AI
4. Whether to work at frontier AI companies if you want to reduce catastrophic risks
5. The variety of approaches in AI governance

Here’s what’s new:

1. We now rank AI governance and policy at the top of our list of impactful career paths

It’s swapped places with AI technical safety research, which is now second.

Here are our reasons for the change:

• Many experts in the field have been increasingly excited about “technical AI governance” — people using technical expertise to inform and shape policies. For example, people can develop sophisticated compute governance policies and norms around evaluating increasingly advanced AI models for dangerous capabilities.
• We know of many people with technical talent and track records choosing to work in governance right now because they think it’s where they can make a bigger difference.
• It’s become more clear that policy-shaping and governance positions within key AI organisations can play critical roles in how the technology progresses.
• We’re seeing a particularly large increase in the number of roles available in AI governance and policy,

The idea this week: mpox and a bird flu virus are testing our pandemic readiness.

Would we be ready for another pandemic?

It became clear in 2020 that the world hadn’t done enough to prepare for the rapid, global spread of a particularly deadly virus. Four years on, our resilience faces new tests.

Two viruses have raised global concerns:

• Mpox — formerly known as monkeypox — has been declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organisation based on its spread from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to nearby countries.
• H5N1 — a strain of bird flu — has been spreading among animals in the United States and elsewhere, with a small number of infections reported in humans.

Here’s what we know about each:

Mpox

Mpox drew international attention in 2022 when it started spreading globally, including in the US and the UK. During that outbreak, around 95,000 cases and about 180 deaths were reported. That wave largely subsided in much of the world, in part due to targeted vaccination campaigns, but the spread of another strain of the virus has sharply accelerated in Central Africa.

The strain driving the current outbreak may be significantly more deadly. Around 22,000 suspected mpox infections and more than 1,200 deaths have been reported in the DRC since January 2023..

The idea this week: totalitarian regimes killed over 100 million people in less than 100 years — and in the future they could be far worse.

That’s because advanced artificial intelligence may prove very useful for dictators. They could use it to surveil their population, secure their grip on power, and entrench their rule, perhaps indefinitely.

I explore this possibility in my new article for 80,000 Hours on the risk of stable totalitarianism.

This is a serious risk. Many of the worst crimes in history, from the Holocaust to the Cambodian Genocide, have been perpetrated by totalitarian regimes. When megalomaniacal dictators decide massive sacrifices are justified to pursue national or personal glory, the results are often catastrophic.

However, even the most successful totalitarian regimes rarely survive more than a few decades. They tend to be brought down by internal resistance, war, or the succession problem — the possibility for sociopolitical change, including liberalisation, after a dictator’s death.

But that could all be upended if technological advancements help dictators overcome these challenges.

In the new article, I address:

• Whether totalitarianism constitutes an existential risk
• How a totalitarian regime could come to dominate the world
• What it would take for such a regime to last forever
• If any of this is even remotely plausible

To be sure,