New releases

Why Orwell would hate AI

Blog post by · Published August 6th, 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 2nd, 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 1st, 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 26th, 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 24th, 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 18th, 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 18th, 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 18th, 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 16th, 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 12th, 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 5th, 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 27th, 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 21st, 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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Nuclear weapons

Problem profile by · Published June 2024

It’s very plausible that there will be a nuclear war this century. If that does happen, there’s a reasonable chance that war would cause some kind of nuclear winter, potentially killing billions, and possibly causing an existential catastrophe.

Nuclear security is already a major topic of interest for governments, but has little attention from philanthropists and NGOs, so we think there are likely some neglected opportunities to reduce the risk.

Most opportunities to influence the risk from nuclear weapons seem to be through working in government, researching key questions, working in communications to advocate for changes, or attempting to build the field (for example, by earning to give).

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Dive into our most in-depth research on careers

Blog post by · Published June 10th, 2024

The idea this week: your career choices may be much more important than you think — and we have a lot of resources to help you think them through.

Your career is one of your biggest opportunities to make a difference in the world and also have a rewarding and interesting life.

That’s why we wrote our career guide — to help people create a career plan that’s aimed at having a positive impact and a fulfilling career.

But there’s a lot of ground to cover, so we couldn’t do it all in a single book.

That’s why we wrote our advanced series. It covers our most in-depth research on questions like:

  • What does it mean to “make a difference”?
  • What is “longtermism,” and why does it matter?
  • Is it ever OK to take a harmful job?
  • Can we balance doing what we love with having a positive impact?
  • What role should finding your personal strengths play in your career?
  • How should you coordinate with others when trying to do good?
  • How long should you explore different career options?
  • And a whole lot more!

We hope the articles in our advanced series help you tackle these questions and accelerate you along your path to an impactful career.

See the whole series here or just browse selected topics below.

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#190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious

Podcast by and · Published June 7th, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Eric Schwitzgebel — professor of philosophy at UC Riverside — about some of the most bizarre and unintuitive claims from his recent book, The Weirdness of the World.

They cover:

  • Why our intuitions seem so unreliable for answering fundamental questions about reality.
  • What the materialist view of consciousness is, and how it might imply some very weird things — like that the United States could be a conscious entity.
  • Thought experiments that challenge our intuitions — like supersquids that think and act through detachable tentacles, and intelligent species whose brains are made up of a million bugs.
  • Eric’s claim that consciousness and cosmology are universally bizarre and dubious.
  • How to think about borderline states of consciousness, and whether consciousness is more like a spectrum or more like a light flicking on.
  • The nontrivial possibility that we could be dreaming right now, and the ethical implications if that’s true.
  • Why it’s worth it to grapple with the universe’s most complex questions, even if we can’t find completely satisfying solutions.
  • And much more.

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#189 – Rachel Glennerster on why we still don’t have vaccines that could save millions

Podcast by and · Published May 29th, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Rachel Glennerster — associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a pioneer in the field of development economics — about how her team’s new Market Shaping Accelerator aims to leverage market forces to drive innovations that can solve pressing world problems.

They cover:

  • How market failures and misaligned incentives stifle critical innovations for social goods like pandemic preparedness, climate change interventions, and vaccine development.
  • How “pull mechanisms” like advance market commitments (AMCs) can help overcome these challenges — including concrete examples like how one AMC led to speeding up the development of three vaccines which saved around 700,000 lives in low-income countries.
  • The challenges in designing effective pull mechanisms, from design to implementation.
  • Why it’s important to tie innovation incentives to real-world impact and uptake, not just the invention of a new technology.
  • The massive benefits of accelerating vaccine development, in some cases, even if it’s only by a few days or weeks.
  • The case for a $6 billion advance market commitment to spur work on a universal COVID-19 vaccine.
  • The shortlist of ideas from the Market Shaping Accelerator’s recent Innovation Challenge that use pull mechanisms to address market failures around improving indoor air quality, repurposing generic drugs for alternative uses, and developing eco-friendly air conditioners for a warming planet.
  • “Best Buys” and “Bad Buys” for improving education systems in low- and middle-income countries, based on evidence from over 400 studies.
  • Lessons from Rachel’s career at the forefront of global development, and how insights from economics can drive transformative change.
  • And much more.

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#188 – Matt Clancy on whether science is good

Podcast by and · Published May 23rd, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Matt Clancy — who oversees Open Philanthropy’s Innovation Policy programme — about his recent work modelling the risks and benefits of the increasing speed of scientific progress.

They cover:

  • Whether scientific progress is actually net positive for humanity.
  • Scenarios where accelerating science could lead to existential risks, such as advanced biotechnology being used by bad actors.
  • Why Matt thinks metascience research and targeted funding could improve the scientific process and better incentivise outcomes that are good for humanity.
  • Whether Matt trusts domain experts or superforecasters more when estimating how the future will turn out.
  • Why Matt is sceptical that AGI could really cause explosive economic growth.
  • And much more.

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The most interesting startup idea I’ve seen recently: AI for epistemics

Blog post by · Published May 19th, 2024

This was originally posted on benjamintodd.substack.com.

If transformative AI might come soon and you want to help that go well, one strategy you might adopt is building something useful that will improve as AI gets more capable.

That way if AI accelerates, your ability to help accelerates too.

Here’s an example: organisations that use AI to improve epistemics — our ability to know what’s true — and make better decisions on that basis.

This was the most interesting impact-oriented entrepreneurial idea I came across when I visited the San Francisco Bay area in February. (Thank you to Carl Shulman who first suggested it.)

Navigating the deployment of AI is going to involve successfully making many crazy hard judgement calls, such as “what’s the probability this system isn’t aligned” and “what might the economic effects of deployment be?”

Some of these judgement calls will need to be made under a lot of time pressure — especially if we’re seeing 100 years of technological progress in under 5.

Being able to make these kinds of decisions a little bit better could therefore be worth a huge amount. And that’s true given almost any future scenario.

Better decision-making can also potentially help with all other cause areas, which is why 80,000 Hours recommends it as a cause area independent from AI.

So the idea is to set up organisations that use AI to improve forecasting and decision-making in ways that can be eventually applied to these kinds of questions.

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#187 – Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a “space bastard”

Podcast by and · Published May 14th, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Zach Weinersmith — the cartoonist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — about the latest book he wrote with his wife Kelly: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

They cover:

  • Why space travel is suddenly getting a lot cheaper and re-igniting enthusiasm around space settlement.
  • What Zach thinks are the best and worst arguments for settling space.
  • Zach’s journey from optimistic about space settlement to a self-proclaimed “space bastard” (pessimist).
  • How little we know about how microgravity and radiation affects even adults, much less the children potentially born in a space settlement.
  • A rundown of where we could settle in the solar system, and the major drawbacks of even the most promising candidates.
  • Why digging bunkers or underwater cities on Earth would beat fleeing to Mars in a catastrophe.
  • How new space settlements could look a lot like old company towns — and whether or not that’s a bad thing.
  • The current state of space law and how it might set us up for international conflict.
  • How space cannibalism legal loopholes might work on the International Space Station.
  • And much more.

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