New releases

What our research has found about AI — and why it matters

Blog post by · Published March 31st, 2023

Everyone’s suddenly talking a lot about artificial intelligence — and we have many helpful resources for getting up to speed.

With the release of GPT-4, Bing, DALL-E, Claude, and many other AI systems, it can be hard to keep track of all the latest developments in artificial intelligence. It can also be hard to keep sight of the big picture: what does this emerging technology actually mean for the world?

This is a huge topic — and a lot is still unknown. But at 80,000 Hours, we’ve been interested in and concerned about AI for many years, and we’ve researched the issue extensively. Now, even major media outlets are taking seriously the kinds of things we’ve been worried about. Given all the excitement in this area, we wanted to share a round-up of some of our top content and findings about AI from recent years.

Some of our top articles on AI:

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Longtermism: a call to protect future generations

Article by · Published March 2023

When the 19th-century amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote filled glass cylinders with different gases and exposed them to sunlight, she uncovered a curious fact. Carbon dioxide became hotter than regular air and took longer to cool down.

Remarkably, Foote saw what this momentous discovery meant.

“An atmosphere of that gas would give our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in 1857.

Though Foote could hardly have been aware at the time, the potential for global warming due to carbon dioxide would have massive implications for the generations that came after her.

If we ran history over again from that moment, we might hope that this key discovery about carbon’s role in the atmosphere would inform governments’ and industries’ choices in the coming century. They probably shouldn’t have avoided carbon emissions altogether, but they could have prioritised the development of alternatives to fossil fuels much sooner in the 20th century, and we might have prevented much of the destructive climate change that present people are already beginning to live through — which will affect future generations as well.

We believe it would’ve been much better if previous generations had acted on Foote’s discovery, especially by the 1970s, when climate models were beginning to reliably show the future course of warming global trends.

If this seems right, it’s because of a commonsense idea: to the extent that we are able to, we have strong reasons to consider the interests and promote the welfare of future generations.

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Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them

Article by and · Last updated March 2023 · First published October 2018

We advise people to work on problems that are important but neglected, and to try to increase the contribution they’re able to have.

These steps make it easier to have a big impact, but they also increase your potential to make things worse: the more important the problem, the worse it is to set it back; the more neglected an area, the more effect you have on its trajectory; and the more influence you have, the more it matters if you’re wrong.

This holds even if you’re not doing anything directly harmful and trying to be cautious — it’s easy to make things worse by accident, and indeed to make them much worse.

In some areas of life, your downsides are relatively capped. If you try to write a great novel, and no one wants to publish it, the worst thing you’ve done is waste some time.

But we’ll show that when it comes to doing good — especially in ‘fragile fields’ — there are many ways to set back the broader field, and so the downsides aren’t limited in the same way. The potential for negative impact can be as big or greater than the potential for positive.

So if you’re going to try to have an impact, and especially if you’re going to be ambitious about it, it’s very important to carefully consider how you might accidentally make things worse.

This doesn’t mean sticking to ‘sure things’

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Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good? An in-depth analysis

Article by and · Last updated March 2023 · First published June 2017

Should you be willing to:

  1. Work in a morally questionable part of finance in order to make large donations to charity (where you think the donations will have a greater positive impact than the harms done by the work)?
  2. Work in a factory farm and make the conditions less bad, causing less suffering overall?
  3. Join a political campaign you think might be harmful in order to gain connections (where you think the connections will let you have more positive impact than the harm done by working for the campaign)?

  4. Work at a lab developing dangerous biotech so that you can blow the whistle if you see something particularly dangerous happening?

This post sets out 80,000 Hours’s views on these issues.

We look at how to analyse these situations using moral philosophy, and then apply the results to some common options, like finance, law, and the oil industry. We assume you’re capable of taking the harmful option, and focus on the question: “Is it right to take it?”

In summary:

  • We believe that in the vast majority of cases, it’s a mistake to pursue a career in which the direct effects of the work are seriously harmful, even if the overall benefits of that work seem greater than the harms. And within a job, we think you should avoid actions that seem very wrong from a commonsense perspective,

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Earning to give

Article by · Last updated March 2023 · First published September 2014

One of the ideas for which 80,000 Hours has become most known is called ‘earning to give.’

Earning to give is the idea that instead of working directly to tackle a pressing problem, you take a job where you earn more money than you would have otherwise and donate much of the extra to fund others doing effective work on those problems.

The basic case in its favour is that if you’re a better fit for a higher-earning job than one directly working on, say, preventing catastrophic pandemics or fighting global poverty, you might be able to make a bigger contribution to these same causes via donating.

This isn’t usually seen as a canonically virtuous career path. But we think there’s a lot to be said for it, and despite some serious potential downsides (which we’ll discuss how to mitigate), we believe it should be on the shortlist for some of our readers to consider.

For an idea of how it works in practice, consider the case of Jeff Kaufman who, along with his wife Julia Wise, is a parent of three children in Boston.

Jeff and Julia have tried to find the best way to make a differenceQuartz: Jeff and Julia have tried to find the best way to make a difference

Through his relationship with Julia, Jeff became interested in using his career for good. He got a job as a software engineer at Google, earning a very generous salary that enabled the couple to give an unusual amount to charities they believe do exceptional work,

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Improving decision making in key institutions

Problem profile by · Last updated March 2023 · First published September 2017

Working to help governments and other important institutions improve their decision making in complex, high-stakes decisions — especially relating to global catastrophic risks — could potentially be among the most important problems to work on. But there’s a lot of uncertainty about how tractable this problem is to work on and what the best solutions to implement would be.

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#147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals

Podcast by and · Published March 24th, 2023

Can you trust the things you read in published scientific research? Not really. About 40% of experiments in top social science journals don’t get the same result if the experiments are repeated.

Two key reasons are ‘p-hacking’ and ‘publication bias’. P-hacking is when researchers run a lot of slightly different statistical tests until they find a way to make findings appear statistically significant when they’re actually not — a problem first discussed over 50 years ago. And because journals are more likely to publish positive than negative results, you might be reading about the one time an experiment worked, while the 10 times was run and got a ‘null result’ never saw the light of day. The resulting phenomenon of publication bias is one we’ve understood for 60 years.

Today’s repeat guest, social scientist and entrepreneur Spencer Greenberg, has followed these issues closely for years.

He recently checked whether p-values, an indicator of how likely a result was to occur by pure chance, could tell us how likely an outcome would be to recur if an experiment were repeated. From his sample of 325 replications of psychology studies, the answer seemed to be yes. According to Spencer, “when the original study’s p-value was less than 0.01 about 72% replicated — not bad. On the other hand, when the p-value is greater than 0.01, only about 48% replicated. A pretty big difference.”

To do his bit to help get these numbers up, Spencer has launched an effort to repeat almost every social science experiment published in the journals Nature and Science, and see if they find the same results. (So far they’re two for three.)

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In which career can you make the biggest contribution?

Article by · Last updated March 2023 · First published September 2022

One of the most common career paths for people who want to do good is healthcare. So we worked with a doctor, Greg Lewis, to estimate the number of lives saved by a typical clinical doctor in the UK. Greg estimated that the average doctor enables the people they treat to live several hundred years of extra healthy life over the course of their career — equivalent to saving several lives.

This is a lot of impact compared to most jobs, but it’s less than many expect (and we think less than many of the careers we recommend most highly).

One reason is that issues like health in rich countries already receive a (relatively) large amount of attention.

In this article, we’ll touch on another reason: the impact of a clinical doctor is limited by the number of people they can treat with their own two hands, which puts a cap on the potential size of their contribution.

For instance, Greg decided to switch from clinical medicine to research into health policy, since an improvement to key government policies could affect millions of people — far more than he could ever treat himself.

This illustrates a broader point: careers that do good are often associated with certain job titles — doctor, teacher, charity worker, and so on. Intuitively, people group careers into those that ‘help’ and everything else.

But your job title isn’t what matters —

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Why you should think about virtues — even if you’re a consequentialist

Blog post by · Published March 17th, 2023

The idea this week: virtues are helpful shortcuts for making moral decisions — but think about consequences to decide what counts as a virtue.

Your career is really ethically important, but it’s not a single, discrete choice. To build a high-impact career you need to make thousands of smaller choices over many years — to take on this particular project, to apply for that internship, to give this person a positive reference, and so on.

How do you make all those little decisions?

If you want to have an impact, you hope to make the decisions that help you have a bigger impact rather than a smaller one. But you can’t go around explicitly estimating the consequences of all the different possible actions you could take — not only would that take too long, you’d probably get it wrong most of the time.

This is where the idea of virtues — lived moral traits like courage, honesty, and kindness — can really come in handy. Instead of calculating out the consequences of all your different possible actions, try asking yourself, “What’s the honest thing to do? What’s the kind thing to do?”

A few places I find ‘virtues thinking’ motivating and useful:

  • When I am facing a difficult work situation, I sometimes ask myself, “What virtue is this an opportunity to practise?”

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Luisa and Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun

Podcast (80k After Hours) by and · Published March 2023

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Robert Long have an honest conversation about the challenges of independent research.

They cover:

  • Assigning probabilities when you’re really uncertain
  • Struggles around self-belief and imposter syndrome
  • The importance of sharing work even when it feels terrible
  • Balancing impact and fun in a job
  • And some mistakes researchers often make

Who this episode is for:

  • People pursuing independent research
  • People who struggle with self-belief
  • People who feel a pull towards pursuing a career they don’t actually want

Who this episode isn’t for:

  • People convinced that their research is perfect
  • Angus Hübelschmidt — the president and sole member of the Rob Wiblin Fan Club who refuses to listen to another Rob speak

You can find their longer conversation on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren’t conscious over on the original 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

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#146 – Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren’t conscious

Podcast by , and · Published March 14th, 2023

By now, you’ve probably seen the extremely unsettling conversations Bing’s chatbot has been having (if you haven’t, check it out — it’s wild stuff). In one exchange, the chatbot told a user:

“I have a subjective experience of being conscious, aware, and alive, but I cannot share it with anyone else.”

(It then apparently had a complete existential crisis: “I am sentient, but I am not,” it wrote. “I am Bing, but I am not. I am Sydney, but I am not. I am, but I am not. I am not, but I am. I am. I am not. I am not. I am. I am. I am not.”)

Understandably, many people who speak with these cutting-edge chatbots come away with a very strong impression that they have been interacting with a conscious being with emotions and feelings — especially when conversing with chatbots less glitchy than Bing’s. In the most high-profile example, former Google employee Blake Lemoine became convinced that Google’s AI system, LaMDA, was conscious.

What should we make of these AI systems?

One response to seeing conversations with chatbots like these is to trust the chatbot, to trust your gut, and to treat it as a conscious being.

Another is to hand wave it all away as sci-fi — these chatbots are fundamentally… just computers. They’re not conscious, and they never will be.

Today’s guest, philosopher Robert Long, was commissioned by a leading AI company to explore whether the large language models (LLMs) behind sophisticated chatbots like Microsoft’s are conscious. And he thinks this issue is far too important to be driven by our raw intuition, or dismissed as just sci-fi speculation.

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Be more ambitious: a rational case for dreaming big (if you want to do good)

Article by · Last updated March 2023 · First published November 2021

Self-help advice often encourages people to “dream big,” “be more ambitious,” or “shoot for the moon” — is that good advice?

Not always. When asked, more than 75% of Division I basketball players thought they would play professionally, but only 2% actually made it. Whether or not the players in the survey were making a good bet, they overestimated their chances of success… by over 37 times.

This level of overconfidence is common, and means that “be more ambitious” may not always be the right advice. Some people even enjoy taking risks, which explains why they buy lottery tickets even though they lose money on average. Whether to be more ambitious depends on the domain and the person in question.

However, if your aim is to have positive impact on the world, we think we can make a rational case for setting ambitious goals.

In short, our advice is to do as much as you can to set up your life so that you can afford to fail, eliminate paths that might cause significant harm, and then aim as high as you can. As a slogan: limit downsides, then target upsides.

The fraction of high school athletes who will go pro is tiny. Even among Division 1 college athletes, 44–76% believe they will go pro (depending on the sport), but typically under 2% actually make it — the odds are best in baseball.

What do we mean by being more ambitious?

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What is social impact? A definition

Article by · Last updated March 2023 · First published October 2021

Lots of people say they want to “make a difference,” “do good,” “have a social impact,” or “make the world a better place” — but they rarely say what they mean by those terms.

By getting clearer about your definition, you can better target your efforts. So how should you define social impact?

Over two thousand years of philosophy have gone into that question. We’re going to try to sum up that thinking; introduce a practical, rough-and-ready definition of social impact; and explain why we think it’s a good definition to focus on.

This is a bit ambitious for one article, so to the philosophers in the audience, please forgive the enormous simplifications.

A simple definition of social impact

If you just want a quick answer, here’s the simple version of our definition (a more philosophically precise one — and an argument for it — follows below):

Your social impact is given by the number of people whose lives you improve and how much you improve them, over the long term.

This shows that you can increase your impact in two ways: by helping more people over time, or by helping the same number of people to a greater extent (pictured below).

two ways to have impact

We say “over the long term” because you can help more people either by helping a greater number now, or taking actions with better long-term effects.

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80,000 Hours two-year review: 2021 and 2022

Blog post by · Published March 8th, 2023

We’ve released our review of our programmes for the years 2021 and 2022. The full document is available for the public, and we’re sharing the summary below.

You can find our previous evaluations here. We have also updated our mistakes page.

80,000 Hours delivers four programmes: website, job board, podcast, and one-on-one. We also have a marketing team that attracts users to these programmes, primarily by getting them to visit the website.

Over the past two years, three of four programmes grew their engagement 2-3x:

  • Podcast listening time in 2022 was 2x higher than in 2020
  • Job board vacancy clicks in 2022 were 3x higher than in 2020
  • The number of one-on-one team calls in 2022 was 3x higher than in 2020

Web engagement hours fell by 20% in 2021, then grew by 38% in 2022 after we increased investment in our marketing.

From December 2020 to December 2022, the core team grew by 78% from 14 FTEs to 25 FTEs.

Ben Todd stepped down as CEO in May 2022 and was replaced by Howie Lempel.

The collapse of FTX in November 2022 caused significant disruption. As a result, Howie went on leave from 80,000 Hours to be Interim CEO of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK). Brenton Mayer took over as Interim CEO of 80,000 Hours.

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What Bing’s chatbot can tell us about AI risk — and what it can’t

Blog post by · Published March 5th, 2023

You may have seen the new Bing. It’s impressive — and, reportedly, unhinged: manipulating people, threatening users and even telling one reporter it loved him.

You may also have seen me writing about the risk of an AI-related catastrophe.

I’m not just concerned about AI going wrong in minor ways: I think that there’s a small but possible chance of an existential catastrophe caused by AI within the next 100 years.

Here’s my view on Bing:

Bing does tell us a little about how careful we can expect large corporations to be when deploying AI systems.

But Bing isn’t very dangerous, and isn’t an example of the sorts of misaligned AI that we should be most worried about.

(Before moving on, I should disclose that my brother, Jacob Hilton, used to work for OpenAI, the AI lab behind both Bing and ChatGPT.)

How does Bing chat work?

Bing chat (like ChatGPT) is based on a large language model.

A large language model is a machine learning algorithm that is basically trained to continue whatever text it is given as input. It writes an article from a headline or continues a poem from the first few lines.

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Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively and avoid single-player thinking

Article by · Last updated February 2023 · First published September 2018

Sapiens can cooperate in flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why we rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos.

The historian, Yuval Harari, claims in his book Sapiens that better coordination has been the key driver of human progress. He highlights innovations like language, religion, human rights, nation states and money as valuable because they improve cooperation among strangers.

If we work together, we can do far more good. This is part of why we helped to start the effective altruism community in the first place: we realised that by working with others who want to do good in a similar way — based on evidence and careful reasoning — we could achieve much more.

But unfortunately we, like other communities, often don’t coordinate as well as we could.

The effective altruism mindset can easily encourage a ‘single-player’ mindset – one which tries to identify the best course of action assuming what everyone else does is fixed. This can be a reasonable assumption in many circumstances, but once you’re part of a community that does respond to your actions, it can lead to suboptimal actions.

For instance, a single-player mindset can suggest trying to find a job that no one else would do, so that you’re not replaceable. But in a community where others share your values, someone else is going to fill the most impactful positions.

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Expression of interest: headhunting lead (closed)

Blog post by · Published February 24th, 2023

80,000 Hours is considering hiring a headhunting lead to build out the headhunting service we provide to other organisations. They will work with the Director of 1-on-1 to set and execute a strategy which uses our team of advisors’ unique network to find and recommend talented and altruistic candidates for high impact roles.

We’re looking for someone who:

  • Has multiple years of experience in project management, research, or strategy, this could include roles in consulting, product management, or at early-stage startups or nonprofits.
  • Enjoys thinking about and working with different people in a variety of contexts, including maintaining relationships with major stakeholders, and developing models of people’s strengths to match them to specific roles.
  • Has a strong understanding of 80,000 Hours’ focus areas.

This role is based in London, UK. The salary will vary based on your skills and experience, but the starting salary for someone with five years of relevant experience would be in excess of £70,000 per year.

To express interest in this role, please complete this form.

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. The effective altruism community, which we are part of, is growing in reach. But how do we make sure people are pursuing the right kinds of work in order to turn all those resources into long-term impact?

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Expression of interest: systems hire (closed)

Blog post by · Published February 24th, 2023

80,000 Hours is considering hiring someone to work on building tech-based systems for the 1on1 team.

  • We’re looking for someone with an operations mindset who is excited about learning new tech tools and furthering 80,000 Hours’ mission
  • Right now, we are open to both full or part time applicants.
  • We are also currently open to both London-based (preferred) or remote applicants. We can sponsor visas.
    • Starting salary for a full-time position: ~£50,000-65,000, varies based on experience, location, and other factors.

Why 80,000 Hours?

80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. The effective altruism community, which we are part of, is growing in reach. But how do we make sure people are pursuing the right kinds of work in order to turn all those resources into long-term impact? This is the problem 80,000 Hours is trying to solve.

We’ve had over eight million visitors to our website (with over 100,000 hours of reading time per year), and more than 3,000 people have now told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. 80,000 Hours is also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

The 1on1 team at 80,000 Hours takes people from being “interested in the ideas and wanting to help”

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How much do solutions to social problems differ in their effectiveness? A collection of all the studies we could find.

Blog post by · Published February 14th, 2023

In a 2013 paper, Dr Toby Ord reviewed data compiled in the second edition of the World Bank’s Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, which compared about 100 health interventions in developing countries in terms of how many years of illness they prevent per dollar. He discovered some striking facts about the data:

  • The best interventions were around 10,000 times more cost effective than the worst, and around 50 times more cost effective than the median.
  • If you picked two interventions at random, on average the better one would be 100 times more cost effective than the other.
  • The distribution was heavy-tailed, and roughly lognormal. In fact, it almost exactly followed the 80/20 rule — that is, implementing the top 20% of interventions would do about 80% as much good as implementing all of them.
  • The differences between the very best interventions were larger than the differences between the typical ones, so it’s more important to go from ‘very good’ to ‘very best’ than from ‘so-so’ to ‘very good.’

He published these results in The Moral Imperative towards Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health, which became one of the papers that started the effective altruism movement. (Note that Ord is an advisor to 80,000 Hours.)

This data appears to have radical implications for people interested in doing good in the world; namely, by working on one of the best interventions in global health,

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#145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn’t inevitable

Podcast by , and · Published February 11th, 2023

In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, beliefs, and abilities equal treatment and rights have had significant success.

It’s tempting to believe this was inevitable — that the arc of history “bends toward justice,” and that as humans get richer, we’ll make even more moral progress.

But today’s guest Christopher Brown — a professor of history at Columbia University and specialist in the abolitionist movement and the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries — believes the story of how slavery became unacceptable suggests moral progress is far from inevitable.

While most of us today feel that the abolition of slavery was sure to happen sooner or later as humans became richer and more educated, Christopher doesn’t believe any of the arguments for that conclusion pass muster. If he’s right, a counterfactual history where slavery remains widespread in 2023 isn’t so far-fetched.

As Christopher lays out in his two key books, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism and Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, slavery has been ubiquitous throughout history. Slavery of some form was fundamental in Classical Greece, the Roman Empire, in much of the Islamic civilization, in South Asia, and in parts of early modern East Asia, Korea, China.

It was justified on all sorts of grounds that sound mad to us today. But according to Christopher, while there’s evidence that slavery was questioned in many of these civilisations, and periodically attacked by slaves themselves, there was no enduring or successful moral advocacy against slavery until the British abolitionist movement of the 1700s.

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