Companies use about 300,000 times more computation training the best AI systems today than they did in 2012 and algorithmic innovations have also made them 25 times more efficient at the same tasks.
These are the headline results of two recent papers — AI and Compute and AI and Efficiency — from the Foresight Team at OpenAI. In today’s episode I spoke with one of the authors, Danny Hernandez, who joined OpenAI after helping develop better forecasting methods at Twitch and Open Philanthropy.
Danny and I talk about how to understand his team’s results and what they mean (and don’t mean) for how we should think about progress in AI going forward.
Debates around the future of AI can sometimes be pretty abstract and theoretical. Danny hopes that providing rigorous measurements of some of the inputs to AI progress so far can help us better understand what causes that progress, as well as ground debates about the future of AI in a better shared understanding of the field.
In the interview, Danny and I (Arden Koehler) also discuss a range of other topics, including:
The question of which experts to believe
Danny’s journey to working at OpenAI
The usefulness of “decision boundaries”
The importance of Moore’s law for people who care about the long-term future
What OpenAI’s Foresight Team’s findings might imply for policy
The question whether progress in the performance of AI systems is linear
The safety teams at OpenAI and who they’re looking to hire
One idea for finding someone to guide your learning
The importance of hardware expertise for making a positive impact
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris. Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.
In March Professor Marc Lipsitch — director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics — abruptly found himself a global celebrity, his social media following growing 40-fold and journalists knocking down his door, as everyone turned to him for information they could trust.
Here he lays out where the fight against COVID-19 stands today, why he’s open to deliberately giving people COVID-19 to speed up vaccine development, and how we could do better next time.
As Marc tells us, island nations like Taiwan and New Zealand are successfully suppressing SARS-COV-2. But everyone else is struggling.
Even Singapore, with plenty of warning and one of the best test and trace systems in the world, lost control of the virus in mid-April after successfully holding back the tide for 2 months.
This doesn’t bode well for how the US or Europe will cope as they ease their lockdowns. It also suggests it would have been exceedingly hard for China to stop the virus before it spread overseas.
But sadly, there’s no easy way out.
The original estimates of COVID-19’s infection fatality rate, of 0.5-1%, have turned out to be basically right. And the latest serology surveys indicate only 5-10% of people in countries like the US, UK and Spain have been infected so far, leaving us far short of herd immunity. To get there, even these worst affected countries would need to endure something like ten times the number of deaths they have so far.
Marc has one good piece of news: research suggests that most of those who get infected do indeed develop immunity, for a while at least.
To escape the COVID-19 trap sooner rather than later, Marc recommends we go hard on all the familiar options — vaccines, antivirals, and mass testing — but also open our minds to creative options we’ve so far left on the shelf.
Despite the importance of his work, even now the training and grant programs that produced the community of experts Marc is a part of, are shrinking. We look at a new article he’s written about how to instead build and improve the field of epidemiology, so humanity can respond faster and smarter next time we face a disease that could kill millions and cost tens of trillions of dollars.
We also cover:
How listeners might contribute as future contagious disease experts, or donors to current projects
How we can learn from cross-country comparisons
Modelling that has gone wrong in an instructive way
What governments should stop doing
How people can figure out who to trust, and who has been most on the mark this time
Why Marc supports infecting people with COVID-19 to speed up the development of a vaccines
How we can ensure there’s population-level surveillance early during the next pandemic
Whether people from other fields trying to help with COVID-19 has done more good than harm
Whether it’s experts in diseases, or experts in forecasting, who produce better disease forecasts
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris. Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.
Amid a rising COVID-19 death toll, and looming economic disaster, we’ve been looking for good news — and one thing we’re especially thankful for is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS).
CHS focuses on protecting us from major biological, chemical or nuclear disasters, through research that informs governments around the world. While this pandemic surprised many, just last October the Center ran a simulation of a ‘new coronavirus’ scenario to identify weaknesses in our ability to quickly respond. Their expertise has given them a key role in figuring out how to fight COVID-19.
Today’s guest, Dr Tara Kirk Sell, did her PhD in policy and communication during disease outbreaks, and has worked at CHS for 11 years on a range of important projects.
Last year she was a leader on Collective Intelligence for Disease Prediction, designed to sound the alarm about upcoming pandemics before others are paying attention. Incredibly, the project almost closed in December, with COVID-19 just starting to spread around the world — but received new funding that allowed the project to respond quickly to the emerging disease.
She also contributed to a recent report attempting to explain the risks of specific types of activities resuming when COVID-19 lockdowns end.
It’s not possible to reach zero risk — so differentiating activities on a spectrum is crucial. Choosing wisely can help us lead more normal lives without reviving the pandemic.
Dance clubs will have to stay closed, but hairdressers can adapt to minimise transmission, and Tara (who happens to also be an Olympic silver medalist swimmer) suggests outdoor non-contact sports could resume soon at little risk.
Analysing the Ebola communication crisis of 2014, they found that even trained coders with public health expertise sometimes needed help to distinguish between true and misleading tweets — showing the danger of a continued lack of definitive information surrounding a virus and how it’s transmitted.
The challenge for governments is not simple. If they acknowledge how much they don’t know, people may look elsewhere for guidance. But if they pretend to know things they don’t, or actively mislead the public, the result can be a huge loss of trust.
Despite their intense focus on COVID-19, researchers at the Center for Health Security know that this is not a one-time event. Many aspects of our collective response this time around have been alarmingly poor, and it won’t be long before Tara and her colleagues need to turn their mind to next time.
You can now donate to CHS through Effective Altruism Funds. Donations made through EA Funds are tax-deductible in the US, the UK, and the Netherlands.
Tara and Rob also discuss:
Who has overperformed and underperformed expectations during COVID-19?
When are people right to mistrust authorities?
The media’s responsibility to be right
What policies should be prioritised for next time
Should we prepare for future pandemic while the COVID-19 is still going?
The importance of keeping non-COVID health problems in mind
The psychological difference between staying home voluntarily and being forced to
Mistakes that we in the general public might be making
Emerging technologies with the potential to reduce global catastrophic biological risks
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris. Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.
Since it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and offer more personalised advice. We try to help people get clear on the most plausible paths for them, the key uncertainties they face in choosing between them, and provide resources, pointers, and introductions to help them in those paths.
I (Michelle Hutchinson) joined the team a couple of years ago after working at Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute, and these days I’m 80,000 Hours’ Head of Advising. Since then, chatting to hundreds of people about their career plans has given me some idea of the kinds of things it’s useful for people to hear about when thinking through their careers.
We all thought it would be useful to discuss some of those on the show for others to hear. Among other topics we cover:
The difficulty of maintaining the ambition to increase your social impact, while also being proud of and motivated by what you’re already accomplishing.
Why traditional careers advice involves thinking through what types of roles you enjoy followed by which of those are impactful, while we recommend going the other way: ranking roles on impact, and then going down the list to find the one you think you’d most flourish in.
That if you’re pitching your job search at the right level of role, you’ll need to apply to a large number of different jobs. So it’s wise to broaden your options, by applying for both stretch and backup roles, and not over-emphasising a small number of organisations.
Our suggested process for writing a longer term career plan: 1. shortlist your best medium to long-term career options, then 2. figure out the key uncertainties in choosing between them, and 3. map out concrete next steps to resolve those uncertainties.
Why many listeners aren’t spending enough time finding out about what the day-to-day work is like in paths they’re considering, or reaching out to people for advice or opportunities.
I also thought it might be useful to give people a sense of what I do and don’t do in advising calls, to help them figure out if they should sign up for it.
If you’re wondering whether you’ll benefit from advising, bear in mind that it tends to be more useful to people:
With similar views to 80,000 Hours on what the world’s most pressing problems are, because we’ve done most research on the problems we think it’s most important to address.
Who don’t yet have close connections with people working at effective altruist organisations.
Who aren’t strongly locationally constrained.
If you’re unsure, it doesn’t take long to apply and a lot of people say they find the application form itself helps them reflect on their plans. We’re particularly keen to hear from people from under-represented backgrounds.
Want to talk to one of our advisors?
We speak to hundreds of people each year and can offer introductions and answer specific questions you might have. You can join the waitlist here:
I describe mistakes I’ve made in advising, and career changes made by people I’ve spoken with.
Rob and I argue about what risks to take with your career, like when it’s sensible to take a study break, or start from the bottom in a new career path.
I try to forecast how I’ll change after I have a baby, Rob speculates wildly on what motherhood is like, and Arden and I mercilessly mock Rob.
It continues to be awe inspiring to me how many people I talk to are donating to save lives, making dietary changes to avoid intolerable suffering, and carefully planning their lives to improve the future trajectory of the world. I hope we can continue to support each other in doing those things, and appreciate how important all this work is.
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris. Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.
In his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, 80,000 Hours trustee Dr Toby Ord suggests a range of research and practical projects that governments could fund to reduce the risk of a global catastrophe that could permanently limit humanity’s prospects.
He compiles over 50 of these in an appendix, which we’ve reproduced below. You may not be convinced by all of these ideas, but they help to give a sense of the breadth of plausible longtermist projects available in policy, science, universities and business.
There are many existential risks and they can be tackled in different ways, which makes it likely that great opportunities are out there waiting to be identified.
Many of these proposals are discussed in the body of The Precipice. We’ve got a 3 hour interview with Toby you could listen to, or you can get a copy of the book mailed you for free by joining our newsletter:
Policy and research recommendations Engineered Pandemics
Strengthen the WHO’s ability to respond to emerging pandemics through rapid disease surveillance, diagnosis and control. This involves increasing its funding and powers, as well as R&D on the requisite technologies.
Blog post by Anonymous · Published April 27th, 2020
The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.
This entry is most likely to be of interest to people who are already aware of or involved with the effective altruism (EA) community.
But it’s the fourteenth in this series of posts with anonymous answers — many of which are likely to be useful to everyone. You can find the complete collection here.
We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.
Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas.
Our lives currently revolve around the global emergency of COVID-19; you’re probably reading this while confined to your house, as the death toll from the worst pandemic since 1918 continues to rise.
The question of how to tackle COVID-19 has been foremost in the minds of many, including here at 80,000 Hours.
Today’s guest, Dr Gregory Lewis, acting head of the Biosecurity Research Group at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, puts the crisis in context, explaining how COVID-19 compares to other diseases, pandemics of the past, and possible worse crises in the future.
COVID-19 is a vivid reminder that we are vulnerable to biological threats and underprepared to deal with them. We have been unable to suppress the spread of COVID-19 around the world and, tragically, global deaths will at least be in the hundreds of thousands.
How would we cope with a virus that was even more contagious and even more deadly? Greg’s work focuses on these risks — of outbreaks that threaten our entire future through an unrecoverable collapse of civilisation, or even the extinction of humanity.
If such a catastrophe were to occur, Greg believes it’s more likely to be caused by accidental or deliberate misuse of biotechnology than by a pathogen developed by nature.
There are a few direct causes for concern: humans now have the ability to produce some of the most dangerous diseases in history in the lab; technological progress may enable the creation of pathogens which are nastier than anything we see in nature; and most biotechnology has yet to even be conceived, so we can’t assume all the dangers will be familiar.
This is grim stuff, but it needn’t be paralysing. In the years following COVID-19, humanity may be inspired to better prepare for the existential risks of the next century: improving our science, updating our policy options, and enhancing our social cohesion.
COVID-19 is a tragedy of stunning proportions, and its immediate threat is undoubtedly worthy of significant resources.
But we will get through it; if a future biological catastrophe poses an existential risk, we may not get a second chance. It is therefore vital to learn every lesson we can from this pandemic, and provide our descendants with the security we wish for ourselves.
Today’s episode is the hosting debut of our Strategy Advisor, Howie Lempel.
80,000 Hours has focused on COVID-19 for the last few weeks and published over ten pieces about it, and a substantial benefit of this interview was to help inform our own views. As such, at times this episode may feel like eavesdropping on a private conversation, and it is likely to be of most interest to people primarily focused on making the long-term future go as well as possible.
In this episode, Howie and Greg cover:
Reflections on the first few months of the pandemic
Common confusions around COVID-19
How COVID-19 compares to other diseases
What types of interventions have been available to policymakers
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type “80,000 Hours” into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris. Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.
Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published April 14th, 2020
There are many career services that would be useful to the effective altruism community, and unfortunately 80,000 Hours is not able to provide them all.
In this post, I aim to sum up what we intend to provide and what we can’t, to make it easier for other groups to fill these gaps.
80,000 Hours’ online content is also serving as one of the most common ways that people get introduced to the effective altruism community, but we’re not the ideal introduction for many types of people, which I also list in the section on online articles.
Our aim is to do the most we can to fill the key skill gaps in the world’s most pressing problems. We think that is the best way we can help to improve the lives of others over the long term.
We think that the best way to do this is – given our small team – to initially specialise on a single target audience, and gradually expand the audience over time.
Given this, most of our effort (say 50%+) is on advice and support for English-speaking people age 20-35 who might be able to enter one of our current priority paths.
We also aim to put ~30% of our effort into other ways of addressing our priority problems (AI,
Below is a list of opportunities to help the global response to COVID-19. The list focuses on opportunities in research, policy, technology and startups, especially in the US and UK, and includes jobs, volunteering opportunities, and opportunities to receive funding. It accompanies our article on how to volunteer to help tackle the crisis most effectively.
It summarises our annual impact evaluation, and outlines our progress, plans, mistakes and fundraising needs.
The document was initially prepared in Nov 2019. We delayed its release until we heard back from some of our largest donors so that other stakeholders would be fully informed about our funding situation before we asked for their support. Most claims should be taken to be made “as of November 2019.”
If you would like to go into more detail, we also provide the following optional sections:
The full review, which includes: metrics; progress by programme; team time allocation; mistakes; cost-effectiveness; strategy updates; priorities for 2020; predictions about 2020; budgets; fundraising targets.
Some countries are turning COVID-19 away at the door, while others are turning the tide of the pandemic
As you can see in this chart, COVID-19 remains mostly controlled in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Taiwan is barely visible down there at the bottom, while Singapore actually hasn’t had enough deaths to make it onto the figure yet.
Once they emerge from their ‘lockdowns’, other places can potentially copy the methods which these three countries have shown can work.
COVID-19 may also be controlled in Hong Kong, Japan and China, which are reporting few new cases. (Unfortunately Hong Kong and Japan aren’t testing enough people to be sure, and China doesn’t say how many tests it’s running, so we’ll have to wait and see.)
This page aims to summarise our understanding of the current science on key questions about COVID-19 (as of 3 April, 2020), as best we can given the state of the evidence and the fast moving situation. We provide more explanation as well as sources in the footnotes.
Symptoms and severity
The most common reported symptoms are cough (appearing in about 80% of confirmed cases – meaning those who have been tested and found to be infected with the virus) and fever (80%-90%). Many also experience shortness of breath, usually later in the disease progression. Diarrhea and other GI symptoms have also been seen in some patients. Nasal congestion and runny nose seem uncommon (<5%). Anecdotally, loss of the sense of taste or smell have also been reported.
Once someone is infected, it seems to typically take ~7 days for symptoms to develop. One study with a large sample size found that for 11.5% of confirmed cases it took more than 14 days.
According to initial data from China, around 81% of confirmed cases are ‘mild’ (though can still involve pneumonia), 14% are severe (requiring hospitalisation), and 5% are critical. A large proportion of people infected with the virus have mild symptoms, and around 20% may have no symptoms, though there is not reliable data here.
Most current estimates of the fraction of infected people (rather than people with confirmed cases) who die from the disease (the ‘IFR’) seem to be between 0.1% and 2%.
Many people have been asking about where they can donate to fight COVID-19, so we asked a couple of advisors for their initial thoughts on which opportunities could be especially high-leverage.
We haven’t evaluated how these compare to donation opportunities in other areas, but if you are keen to donate specifically to COVID-19-related work then read on.
They’ve been one of the most influential sources of information and analysis for helping inform policymakers’ response to the crisis, for instance releasing influential situation reports at least once a day since January 22nd.
Getting the policy response right seems like a crucial lever in navigating the crisis, and requires comparatively little funding.
They had a good track record of work on pandemic preparedness before the crisis, and received a large grant from Open Philanthropy in 2019.
My best guess is that if the CHS has urgent funding needs during the crisis, those needs will be met by other donors, especially Open Philanthropy. However, the Center’s budget is large, so in the longer term I expect it could make productive use of additional funding,
Research to understand the disease and to develop new treatments and a vaccine.
Determine the right policies, both for public health and the economic response.
Increase healthcare capacity, especially for testing, ventilators, personal protective equipment, and critical care.
Slow the spread through testing & isolating cases, as well as mass advocacy to promote social distancing and other key behaviours, buying us more time to do the above.
We also need to keep society functioning through the progression of the pandemic.
To maximise your impact, the aim is to identify a high-leverage opportunity to contribute to one of these bottlenecks that’s a good fit for your skills.
Blog post by Arden Koehler · Published March 21st, 2020
At the time of this writing, COVID 19 — a flu-like respiratory disease causing fever and pneumonia — has killed over 11,000 people and has likely infected over 2 million. The growth in new cases is exponential, although cases are slowing substantially in places where strict containment measures have been instituted.
Cities are shutting down around the world. Although it is very hard to predict what will happen, it seems likely this outbreak will end up being among the worst economic and humanitarian disasters of the last 100 years.
We will be producing plenty more on this topic and it will all be posted on our COVID-19 landing page.
COVID-19 is proof that a global pandemic can happen in the 21st century. It has also shown how underprepared we are as a world to coordinate with one another and deal with disasters like these.
Unfortunately, it’s possible for things to get much worse than COVID-19.
From the perspective of preventing threats to the long term future of humanity, preventing global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs) is especially important. GCBRs are risks from biological agents that threaten great worldwide damage to human welfare, and place the long-term trajectory of humankind in jeopardy.
GCBRs seem much more likely to arise from engineered pandemics than natural ones.
Hours ago from home isolation Rob and Howie recorded an episode on:
How many could die in the coronavirus crisis, and the risk to your health personally.
What individuals might be able to do.
What we suspect governments should do.
The properties of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the importance of not contributing to its spread, and how you can reduce your chance of catching it.
The ways some societies have screwed up, which countries have been doing better than others, how we can avoid this happening again, and why we’re optimistic.
We’ve rushed this episode out, accepting a higher risk of errors, in order to share information as quickly as possible about a very fast-moving situation.
We’ve compiled 70 links below to projects you could get involved with, as well as academic papers and other resources to understand the situation and what’s needed to fix it.
Please also see our ‘problem profile’ on global catastrophic biological risks for information on these grave risks and how you can contribute to preventing them.
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app.
To do good, most of us look to use our time and money to affect the world around us today. But perhaps that’s all wrong.
If you took $1,000 you were going to donate and instead put it in the stock market — where it grew on average 5% a year — in 100 years you’d have $125,000 to give away instead. And in 200 years you’d have $17 million.
This astonishing fact has driven today’s guest, economics researcher Philip Trammell at Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute, to investigate the case for and against so-called ‘patient philanthropy’ in depth. If the case for patient philanthropy is as strong as Phil believes, many of us should be trying to improve the world in a very different way than we are now.
He points out that on top of being able to dispense vastly more, whenever your trustees decide to use your gift to improve the world, they’ll also be able to rely on the much broader knowledge available to future generations. A donor two hundred years ago couldn’t have known distributing anti-malarial bed nets was a good idea. Not only did bed nets not exist — we didn’t even know about germs, and almost nothing in medicine was justified by science.
What similar leaps will our descendants have made in 200 years, allowing your now vast foundation to benefit more people in even greater ways?
And there’s a third reason to wait as well. What are the odds that we today live at the most critical point in history, when resources happen to have the greatest ability to do good? It’s possible. But the future may be very long, so there has to be a good chance that some moment in the future will be both more pivotal and more malleable than our own.
Of course, there are many objections to this proposal. If you start a foundation you hope will wait around for centuries, might it not be destroyed in a war, revolution, or financial collapse?
Or might it not drift from its original goals, eventually just serving the interest of its distant future trustees, rather than the noble pursuits you originally intended?
Or perhaps it could fail for the reverse reason, by staying true to your original vision — if that vision turns out to be as deeply morally mistaken as the Rhodes’ Scholarships initial charter, which limited it to ‘white Christian men’.
Alternatively, maybe the world will change in the meantime, making your gift useless. At one end, humanity might destroy itself before your trust tries to do anything with the money. Or perhaps everyone in the future will be so fabulously wealthy, or the problems of the world already so overcome, that your philanthropy will no longer be able to do much good.
Are these concerns, all of them legitimate, enough to overcome the case in favour of patient philanthropy? In today’s conversation with researcher Phil Trammell and my 80,000 Hours colleague Howie Lempel, we try to answer that, and also discuss:
Real attempts at patient philanthropy in history and how they worked out
Should we have a mixed strategy, where some altruists are patient and others impatient?
Which causes are most likely to need money now, and which later?
What is the research frontier in this issue of global prioritisation?
What does this all mean for what listeners should do differently?
COVID-19
Finally, note that we recorded this podcast before the appearance of COVID-19. And as we discuss, Phil makes the case that patient philanthropists should wait for moments in history when patient philanthropic resources can do the most good. Could the coronavirus crisis be one of those important historical episodes during which Phil would argue that even patient philanthropists should ramp up their spending?
We’ve spoken with him more recently, and he says that this strikes him as unlikely. The virus is certainly doing widespread damage, but most of this damage is expected to accrue in the next few years at most. As a result, this is the sort of crisis that governments and impatient philanthropists are happy to spend on (to the extent that spending can help at all).
On Phil’s view, therefore, patient philanthropists are still best advised to wait i) until they’re rich enough to better address, or fund more substantial preparation for, similar future crises, or, ii) until we face crises with unusually long-lasting impacts, not just unusually severe impacts.
If this is right, COVID-19 just serves as an example of the many temptations to spend in the present that patient philanthropists will have to resist, in order to reap the benefits that can come from waiting to do good.
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris. Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.
Problem profile by Gregory Lewis · Published March 2020
Plagues throughout history suggest the potential for biology to cause global catastrophe. This potential increases in step with the march of biotechnological progress. Global Catastrophic Biological Risks (GCBRs) may compose a significant share of all global catastrophic risk, and, if so, a credible threat to humankind.
Despite extensive existing efforts addressed to nearby fields like biodefense and public health, GCBRs remain a large challenge that is plausibly both neglected and tractable. The existing portfolio of work often overlooks risks of this magnitude, and largely does not focus on the mechanisms by which such disasters are most likely to arise.
Much remains unclear: the contours of the risk landscape, the best avenues for impact, and how people can best contribute. Despite these uncertainties, GCBRs are plausibly one of the most important challenges facing humankind, and work to reduce these risks is highly valuable.
After reading, you may also like to listen to our podcast interview with the author about this article and the COVID-19 pandemic.
This week Oxford academic and advisor to 80,000 Hours Toby Ord released his new book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. It’s about how our long-term future could be better than almost anyone believes, but also how humanity’s recklessness is putting that future at grave risk, in Toby’s reckoning a 1 in 6 chance of being extinguished this century.
I loved the book and learned a great deal from it.
While preparing for this interview I copied out 87 facts that were surprising to me or seemed important. Here’s a sample of 16:
The probability of a supervolcano causing a civilisation-threatening catastrophe in the next century is estimated to be 100x that of asteroids and comets combined.
The Biological Weapons Convention — a global agreement to protect humanity — has just four employees, and a smaller budget than an average McDonald’s.
In 2008 a ‘gamma ray burst’ reached Earth from another galaxy, 10 billion light years away. It was still bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. We aren’t sure what generates gamma ray bursts but one cause may be two neutron stars colliding.
Before detonating the first nuclear weapon, scientists in the Manhattan Project feared that the high temperatures in the core, unprecedented for Earth, might be able to ignite the hydrogen in water. This would set off a self-sustaining reaction that would burn off the Earth’s oceans, killing all life above ground. They thought this was unlikely, but many atomic scientists feared their calculations could be missing something. As far as we know, the US President was never informed of this possibility, but similar risks were one reason Hitler stopped pursuing the Bomb.
If we eventually burn all the fossil fuels we’re confident we can access, the leading Earth-system models suggest we’d experience 9–13°C of warming by 2300, an absolutely catastrophic increase.
In 1939, the renowned nuclear scientist Enrico Fermi told colleagues that a nuclear chain reaction was but a ‘remote possibility’. Four years later Fermi himself was personally overseeing the world’s first nuclear reactor. Wilbur Wright predicted heavier-than-air flight was at least fifty years away — just two years before he himself invented it.
The Japanese bioweapons programme in the Second World War — which included using bubonic plague against China — was directly inspired by an anti-bioweapons treaty. The reasoning ran that if Western powers felt the need to outlaw their use, these weapons must especially good to have.
In the early 20th century the Spanish Flu killed 3-6% of the world’s population. In the 14th century the Black Death killed 25-50% of Europeans. But that’s not the worst pandemic to date: that’s the passage of European diseases to the Americans, which may have killed as much as 90% of the local population.
A recent paper estimated that even if honeybees were completely lost — and all other pollinators too — this would only create a 3 to 8 percent reduction in global crop production.
In 2007, foot-and-mouth disease, a high-risk pathogen that can only be studied in labs following the top level of biosecurity, escaped from a research facility leading to an outbreak in the UK. An investigation found that the virus had escaped from a badly-maintained pipe. After repairs, the lab’s licence was renewed — only for another leak to occur two weeks later.
Toby estimates that ‘great power wars effectively pose more than a percentage point of existential risk over the next century. This makes it a much larger contributor to total existential risk than all the natural risks like asteroids and volcanos combined.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev found it so hard to communicate, and the long delays so dangerous, that they established the ‘red telephone’ system so they could write to one another directly, and better avoid future crises coming so close to the brink.
A US Airman claims that during a nuclear false alarm in 1962 that he himself witnessed, two airmen from one launch site were ordered to run through the underground tunnel to the launch site of another missile, with orders to shoot a lieutenant if he continued to refuse to abort the launch of his missile.
In 2014 GlaxoSmithKline accidentally released 45 litres of concentrated polio virus into a river in Belgium. In 2004, SARS escaped from the National Institute of Virology in Beijing. In 2005 at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey, three mice infected with bubonic plague went missing from the lab and were never found.
The Soviet Union covered 22 million square kilometres, 16% of the world’s land area. At its height, during the reign of Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, the Mongol Empire had a population of 100 million, around 25% of world’s population at the time.
All the methods we’ve come up with for deflecting asteroids wouldn’t work on one big enough to cause human extinction.
While I’ve been studying this topic for a long time, and known Toby eight years, a remarkable amount of what’s in the book was new to me.
Of course the book isn’t a series of isolated amusing facts, but rather a systematic review of the many ways humanity’s future could go better or worse, how we might know about them, and what might be done to improve the odds.
And that’s how we approach this conversation, first talking about each of the main risks, then how we can learn about things that have never happened before, then finishing with what a great future for humanity might look like and how it might be achieved.
Toby is a famously good explainer of complex issues — a bit of a modern Carl Sagan character — so as expected this was a great interview, and one which my colleague Arden Koehler and I barely even had to work for.
For those wondering about pandemic just now, this extract about diseases like COVID-19 was the most read article in the The Guardian USA the day the book was launched.
Some topics Arden and I bring up:
What Toby changed his mind about while writing the book
Asteroids, comets, supervolcanoes, and threats from space
Why natural and anthropogenic risks should be treated so differently
Are people exaggerating when they say that climate change could actually end civilization?
What can we learn from historical pandemics?
How to estimate likelihood of nuclear war
Toby’s estimate of unaligned AI causing human extinction in the next century
Is this century be the most important time in human history, or is that a narcissistic delusion?
Competing visions for humanity’s ideal future
And more.
Interested in applying this thinking to your career?
If you found this interesting, and are thinking through how considerations like these might affect your career choices, our team might be able to speak with you one-on-one. We can help you consider your options, make connections with others working on similar issues, and possibly even help you find jobs or funding opportunities.
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris. Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.
The 80,000 Hours Podcast is about “the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them”, and in this episode we tackle that question in the most direct way possible.
Last year we published a summary of all our key ideas, which links to many of our other articles, and which we are aiming to keep updated as our opinions shift.
All of us added something to it, but the single biggest contributor was our CEO and today’s guest, Ben Todd, who founded 80,000 Hours along with Will MacAskill back in 2012.
This key ideas page is the most read on the site. By itself it can teach you a large fraction of the most important things we’ve discovered since we started investigating high impact careers.
But it’s perhaps more accurate to think of it as a mini-book, as it weighs in at over 20,000 words.
Fortunately it’s designed to be highly modular and it’s easy to work through it over multiple sessions, scanning over the articles it links to on each topic.
Perhaps though, you’d prefer to absorb our most essential ideas in conversation form, in which case this episode is for you.
If you want to have a big impact with your career, and you say you’re only going to read one article from us, we recommend you read our key ideas page.
And likewise, if you’re only going to listen to one of our podcast episodes, it should be this one. We have fun and set a strong pace, running through:
The most common misunderstandings of our advice
A high level overview of what 80,000 Hours generally recommends
Our key moral positions
What are the most pressing problems to work on and why?
Which careers effectively contribute to solving these problems?
Central aspects of career strategy like how to weigh up career capital, personal fit, and exploration
As well as plenty more.
One benefit of this podcast over the article is that we can more easily communicate uncertainty, and dive into the things we’re least sure about, or didn’t yet cover within the article.
Note though that our what’s in the article is more precisely stated, our advice is going to keep shifting, and we’re aiming to keep the key ideas page current as our thinking evolves over time. This episode was recorded in November 2019, so if you notice a conflict between the page and this episode in the future, go with the page!
Update: As of Sept 2021, you can now see this more recent introduction to the key ideas of 80,000 Hours and our story on the Superdatascience podcast, which is especially good for people with STEM backgrounds. You can also see another introduction on Clearer Thinking, which is a bit more in-depth.
Interested in applying this thinking to your career?
If you found this interesting, and are thinking through how considerations like these might affect your career choices, our team might be able to speak with you one-on-one. We can help you consider your options, make connections with others working on similar issues, and possibly even help you find jobs or funding opportunities.
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris. Audio mastering: Ben Cordell. Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.
