New releases

#198 – Meghan Barrett on upending everything you thought you knew about bugs in 3 hours

Podcast by , and · Published August 26, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Meghan Barrett — insect neurobiologist and physiologist at Indiana University Indianapolis and founding director of the Insect Welfare Research Society — about her work to understand insects’ potential capacity for suffering, and what that might mean for how humans currently farm and use insects.

They cover:

  • The scale of potential insect suffering in the wild, on farms, and in labs.
  • Examples from cutting-edge insect research, like how depression- and anxiety-like states can be induced in fruit flies and successfully treated with human antidepressants.
  • How size bias might help explain why many people assume insects can’t feel pain.
  • Practical solutions that Meghan’s team is working on to improve farmed insect welfare, such as standard operating procedures for more humane slaughter methods.
  • Challenges facing the nascent field of insect welfare research, and where the main research gaps are.
  • Meghan’s personal story of how she went from being sceptical of insect pain to working as an insect welfare scientist, and her advice for others who want to improve the lives of insects.
  • And much more.

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#197 – Nick Joseph on whether Anthropic’s AI safety policy is up to the task

Podcast by and · Published August 22, 2024

The three biggest AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind — have now all released policies designed to make their AI models less likely to go rogue or cause catastrophic damage as they approach, and eventually exceed, human capabilities. Are they good enough?

That’s what host Rob Wiblin tries to hash out in this interview (recorded May 30) with Nick Joseph — one of the 11 people who left OpenAI to launch Anthropic, its current head of training, and a big fan of Anthropic’s “responsible scaling policy” (or “RSP”). Anthropic is the most safety focused of the AI companies, known for a culture that treats the risks of its work as deadly serious.

As Nick explains, these scaling policies commit companies to dig into what new dangerous things a model can do — after it’s trained, but before it’s in wide use. The companies then promise to put in place safeguards they think are sufficient to tackle those capabilities before availability is extended further. For instance, if a model could significantly help design a deadly bioweapon, then its weights need to be properly secured so they can’t be stolen by terrorists interested in using it that way.

As capabilities grow further — for example, if testing shows that a model could exfiltrate itself and spread autonomously in the wild — then new measures would need to be put in place to make that impossible, or demonstrate that such a goal can never arise.

Nick points out three big virtues to the RSP approach:

  • It allows us to set aside the question of when any of these things will be possible, and focus the conversation on what would be necessary if they are possible — something there is usually much more agreement on.
  • It means we don’t take costly precautions that developers will resent and resist before they are actually called for.
  • As the policies don’t allow models to be deployed until suitable safeguards are in place, they align a firm’s commercial incentives with safety — for example, a profitable product release could be blocked by insufficient investments in computer security or alignment research years earlier.

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Mpox and H5N1: assessing the situation

Blog post by · Published August 16, 2024

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:

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..

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#196 – Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter

Podcast by and · Published August 15, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Dr Jonathan Birch — philosophy professor at the London School of Economics — about his new book, The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI. (Check out the free PDF version!)

They cover:

  • Candidates for sentience — such as humans with consciousness disorders, foetuses, neural organoids, invertebrates, and AIs.
  • Humanity’s history of acting as if we’re sure that such beings are incapable of having subjective experiences — and why Jonathan thinks that that certainty is completely unjustified.
  • Chilling tales about overconfident policies that probably caused significant suffering for decades.
  • How policymakers can act ethically given real uncertainty.
  • Whether simulating the brain of the roundworm C. elegans or Drosophila (aka fruit flies) would create minds equally sentient to the biological versions.
  • How new technologies like brain organoids could replace animal testing, and how big the risk is that they could be sentient too.
  • Why Jonathan is so excited about citizens’ assemblies.
  • Jonathan’s conversation with the Dalai Lama about whether insects are sentient.
  • And plenty more.

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Why Orwell would hate AI

Blog post by · Published August 6, 2024

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:

To be sure,

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Advisor [Applications closed]

Blog post by · Published August 2, 2024

The role

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

We’re keen to hire another advisor to talk to talented and altruistic people in order to help them find high-impact careers.

It’s a great sign you’d enjoy being an 80,000 Hours advisor if you’ve enjoyed managing, mentoring, or teaching. We’ve found that experience with coaching is not necessary — backgrounds in a range of fields like medicine, research, management consulting, and more have helped our advisors become strong candidates for the role.

For example, Laura González-Salmerón joined us after working as an investment manager, Abigail Hoskin completed her PhD in Psychology, and Matt Reardon was previously a corporate lawyer. But it’s also particularly useful for us to have a broad range of experience on the team, so we’re excited to hear from people with all kinds of backgrounds.

The core of this role is having one-on-one conversations with people to help them plan their careers. We have a tight-knit, fast-paced team, though, so people take on a variety of responsibilities . These include, for example, building networks and expertise in our priority paths, analysing data to improve our services, and writing posts for the 80,000 Hours website or the EA Forum.

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for someone who has:

  • A strong interest in effective altruism and longtermism
  • Strong analytical skills,

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#195 – Sella Nevo on who’s trying to steal frontier AI models, and what they could do with them

Podcast by and · Published August 1, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Sella Nevo — director of the Meselson Center at RAND — about his team’s latest report on how to protect the model weights of frontier AI models from actors who might want to steal them.

They cover:

  • Real-world examples of sophisticated security breaches, and what we can learn from them.
  • Why AI model weights might be such a high-value target for adversaries like hackers, rogue states, and other bad actors.
  • The many ways that model weights could be stolen, from using human insiders to sophisticated supply chain hacks.
  • The current best practices in cybersecurity, and why they may not be enough to keep bad actors away.
  • New security measures that Sella hopes can mitigate with the growing risks.
  • Sella’s work using machine learning for flood forecasting, which has significantly reduced injuries and costs from floods across Africa and Asia.
  • And plenty more.

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#194 – Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government

Podcast by and · Published July 26, 2024

Can ‘effective accelerationists’ and AI ‘doomers’ agree on a common philosophy of technology? Common sense says no. But programmer and Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin showed otherwise with his essay “My techno-optimism,” which both camps agreed was basically reasonable.

Seeing his social circle divided and fighting, Vitalik hoped to write a careful synthesis of the best ideas from both the optimists and the apprehensive.

Accelerationists are right: most technologies leave us better off, the human cost of delaying further advances can be dreadful, and centralising control in government hands often ends disastrously.

But the fearful are also right: some technologies are important exceptions, AGI has an unusually high chance of being one of those, and there are options to advance AI in safer directions.

The upshot? Defensive acceleration: humanity should run boldly but also intelligently into the future — speeding up technology to get its benefits, but preferentially developing ‘defensive’ technologies that lower systemic risks, permit safe decentralisation of power, and help both individuals and countries defend themselves against aggression and domination.

What sorts of things is he talking about? In the area of disease prevention it’s most easy to see: disinfecting indoor air, rapid-turnaround vaccine platforms, and nasal spray vaccines that prevent disease transmission all make us safer against pandemics without generating any apparent new threats of their own. (And they might eliminate the common cold to boot!)

Vitalik explains how he mentally breaks down defensive technologies into four broad categories:

  • Defence against big physical things like tanks.
  • Defence against small physical things like diseases.
  • Defence against unambiguously hostile information like fraud.
  • Defence against ambiguously hostile information like possible misinformation.

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Open position: Head of Video

Blog post by · Published July 24, 2024

Why this role?

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

Users can engage with our research in many forms: as longform articles published on our site, as a paperback book received via our book giveaway, as a podcast, or in smaller chunks via our newsletter. But we have relatively little support available in video format.

Time spent on the internet is increasingly spent watching video, and for many people in our target audience, video is the main way that they both find entertainment and learn about topics that matter to them.

We think that one of the best ways we could increase our impact going forward is to have a mature and robust pipeline for producing videos on topics that will help our audience find more impactful careers.

Back in 2017, we started a podcast; today, our podcast episodes reach more than 100,000 listeners, and are commonly cited by listeners as one of the best ways they know of to learn about the world’s most pressing problems. Our hope is that a video programme could be similarly successful — or reach an even larger scale.

We’ve also produced two ten-minute videos already that we were pleased with and got mostly positive feedback on. Using targeted digital advertising, we found we could generate an hour of engagement with the videos for just $0.40,

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#193 – Sihao Huang on navigating the geopolitics of US–China AI competition

Podcast by and · Published July 18, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks with Sihao Huang about his work on AI governance and tech policy in China, what’s happening on the ground in China in AI development and regulation, and the importance of US–China cooperation on AI governance.

They cover:

  • Whether the US and China are in an AI race, and the global implications if they are.
  • The state of the art of AI in China.
  • China’s response to American export controls, and whether China is on track to indigenise its semiconductor supply chain.
  • How China’s current AI regulations try to maintain a delicate balance between fostering innovation and keeping strict information control over the Chinese people.
  • Whether China’s extensive AI regulations signal real commitment to safety or just censorship — and how AI is already used in China for surveillance and authoritarian control.
  • How advancements in AI could reshape global power dynamics, and Sihao’s vision of international cooperation to manage this responsibly.
  • And plenty more.

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Open position: Marketer

Blog post by · Published July 18, 2024

Why this role?

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

Since the launch of our marketing programme in 2022, we’ve increased the hours that people spend engaging with our content by 6.5x, reached millions of new users across different platforms, and now have over 500,000 newsletter subscribers. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

Even so, it seems like there’s considerable room to grow further — we’re not nearly at the ceiling of what we think we can achieve. So, we’re looking for a new marketer to help us bring the marketing team to its full potential.

We anticipate that the right person in this role could help us massively increase our readership, and lead to hundreds or thousands of additional people pursuing high-impact careers.

As some indication of what success in the role might look like, over the next couple of years your team might have:

  • Cost-effectively deployed $5 million reaching people from our target audience.
  • Worked with some of the largest and most well-regarded YouTube channels (for instance, we have run sponsorships with Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, and Wendover Productions).
  • Designed digital ad campaigns that reached hundreds of millions of people.
  • Driven hundreds of thousands of additional newsletter subscriptions,

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Open position: Head of Marketing

Blog post by · Published July 18, 2024

Why this role?

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

Since the launch of our marketing programme in 2022, we’ve increased the hours that people spend engaging with our content by 6.5x, reached millions of new users across different platforms, and now have over 500,000 newsletter subscribers. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

Even so, it seems like there’s considerable room to grow further — we’re not nearly at the ceiling of what we think we can achieve. So, we’re looking for a new team lead to help us bring the marketing team to its full potential.

We anticipate that the right person in this role could help us massively increase our readership, and lead to hundreds or thousands of additional people pursuing high-impact careers.

As some indication of what success in the role might look like, over the next couple of years your team might have:

  • Cost-effectively deployed $5 million reaching people from our target audience.
  • Worked with some of the largest and most well-regarded YouTube channels (for instance, we have run sponsorships with Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, and Wendover Productions).
  • Designed digital ad campaigns that reached hundreds of millions of people.

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Mental health and your career: our top resources

Blog post by · Published July 16, 2024

The idea this week: people pursuing altruistic careers often struggle with imposter syndrome, anxiety, and moral perfectionism. And we’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what helps.

More than 20% of working US adults said their work harmed their mental health in 2023, according to a survey from the American Psychological Association.

Jobs can put a strain on anyone. And if you aim — like many of our readers do — to help others with your career, your work may feel extra demanding.

Work that you feel really matters can be much more interesting and fulfilling. But it can also sometimes be a double-edged sword — after all, your success doesn’t only matter for you but also for those you’re trying to help.

So this week, we want to share a roundup of some of our top content on mental health:

  1. An interview with our previous CEO on having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome — this is one of our most popular interviews ever. It gives a remarkably honest and insightful account of what struggles with mental health can feel like from the inside, how they can derail a career, and how you can get back on track. It also provides lots of practical tips for how you can navigate these issues, and tries to offer a corrective to common advice that doesn’t work for everyone.

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#192 – Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US

Podcast by and · Published July 12, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author Annie Jacobsen about her latest book, Nuclear War: A Scenario.

They cover:

  • The most harrowing findings from Annie’s hundreds of hours of interviews with nuclear experts.
  • What happens during the window that the US president would have to decide about nuclear retaliation after hearing news of a possible nuclear attack.
  • The horrific humanitarian impacts on millions of innocent civilians from nuclear strikes.
  • The overlooked dangers of a nuclear-triggered electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack crippling critical infrastructure within seconds.
  • How we’re on the razor’s edge between the logic of nuclear deterrence and catastrophe, and urgently need reforms to move away from hair-trigger alert nuclear postures.
  • And plenty more.

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#191 – Carl Shulman on government and society after AGI (Part 2)

Podcast by and · Published July 5, 2024

This is the second part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The first episode is on the economy and national security after AGI. You can listen to them in either order!

If we develop artificial general intelligence that’s reasonably aligned with human goals, it could put a fast and near-free superhuman advisor in everyone’s pocket. How would that affect culture, government, and our ability to act sensibly and coordinate together?

It’s common to worry that AI advances will lead to a proliferation of misinformation and further disconnect us from reality. But in today’s conversation, AI expert Carl Shulman argues that this underrates the powerful positive applications the technology could have in the public sphere.

As Carl explains, today the most important questions we face as a society remain in the “realm of subjective judgement” — without any “robust, well-founded scientific consensus on how to answer them.” But if AI ‘evals’ and interpretability advance to the point that it’s possible to demonstrate which AI models have truly superhuman judgement and give consistently trustworthy advice, society could converge on firm or ‘best-guess’ answers to far more cases.

If the answers are publicly visible and confirmable by all, the pressure on officials to act on that advice could be great.

That’s because when it’s hard to assess if a line has been crossed or not, we usually give people much more discretion. For instance, a journalist inventing an interview that never happened will get fired because it’s an unambiguous violation of honesty norms — but so long as there’s no universally agreed-upon standard for selective reporting, that same journalist will have substantial discretion to report information that favours their preferred view more often than that which contradicts it.

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#191 – Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI (Part 1)

Podcast by and · Published June 27, 2024

Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI

This is the first part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The second episode is on government and society after AGI. You can listen to them in either order!

The human brain does what it does with a shockingly low energy supply: just 20 watts — a fraction of a cent worth of electricity per hour. What would happen if AI technology merely matched what evolution has already managed, and could accomplish the work of top human professionals given a 20-watt power supply?

Many people sort of consider that hypothetical, but maybe nobody has followed through and considered all the implications as much as Carl Shulman. Behind the scenes, his work has greatly influenced how leaders in artificial general intelligence (AGI) picture the world they’re creating.

Carl simply follows the logic to its natural conclusion. This is a world where 1 cent of electricity can be turned into medical advice, company management, or scientific research that would today cost $100s, resulting in a scramble to manufacture chips and apply them to the most lucrative forms of intellectual labour.

It’s a world where, given their incredible hourly salaries, the supply of outstanding AI researchers quickly goes from 10,000 to 10 million or more, enormously accelerating progress in the field.

It’s a world where companies operated entirely by AIs working together are much faster and more cost-effective than those that lean on humans for decision making, and the latter are progressively driven out of business.

It’s a world where the technical challenges around control of robots are rapidly overcome, leading to robots into strong, fast, precise, and tireless workers able to accomplish any physical work the economy requires, and a rush to build billions of them and cash in.

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Does your vote matter? What the research says

Blog post by · Published June 21, 2024

The idea this week: the cynical case against voting and getting involved in politics doesn’t hold up.

Does your vote matter? Around half of the world’s population is expected to see national elections this year, and voters in places like Taiwan, India, and Mexico have already gone to the polls. The UK and France both recently scheduled elections.

And of course, the 2024 US national election campaigns are off and running, with control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House in contention — as well as many state houses, governorships, and other important offices.

Sometimes people think that their vote doesn’t matter because they’re just a drop in the ocean.

But my colleague Rob has explored the research on this topic, and he concluded that voting can actually be a surprisingly impactful way to spend your time. So it’s not just your civic duty — it can also be a big opportunity to influence the world for the better.

That’s because, while the chance your vote will change the outcome of an election is small, it can still matter a lot given the massive impact governments can have.

To take a simple model: if the US government discretionary spending is $6.4 trillion over four years, and you have a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome of the national election,

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