Problem profile by The 80,000 Hours team · Last updated December 2023 · First published April 2020
Some of the deadliest events in history have been pandemics. COVID-19 demonstrated that we’re still vulnerable to these events, and future outbreaks could be far more lethal.
In fact, we face the possibility of biological disasters that are worse than ever before due to developments in technology.
The chances of such catastrophic pandemics — bad enough to potentially derail civilisation and threaten humanity’s future — seem uncomfortably high. We believe this risk is one of the world’s most pressing problems.
And there are a number of practical options for reducing global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs). So we think working to reduce GCBRs is one of the most promising ways to safeguard the future of humanity right now.
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Nita Farahany — professor of law and philosophy at Duke Law School — about applications of cutting-edge neurotechnology.
They cover:
How close we are to actual mind reading.
How hacking neural interfaces could cure depression.
How companies might use neural data in the workplace — like tracking how productive you are, or using your emotional states against you in negotiations.
How close we are to being able to unlock our phones by singing a song in our heads.
How neurodata has been used for interrogations, and even criminal prosecutions.
The possibility of linking brains to the point where you could experience exactly the same thing as another person.
Military applications of this tech, including the possibility of one soldier controlling swarms of drones with their mind.
And plenty more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez Transcriptions: Katy Moore
In this episode of 80k After Hours — recorded in June 2022 — Rob Wiblin and Benjamin Todd discuss the history of 80,000 Hours.
They cover:
Ben’s origin story
How 80,000 Hours got off the ground
Its scrappy early days
How 80,000 Hours evolved
Team trips to China and Thailand
The choice to set up several programmes rather than focus on one
The move to California and back
Various mistakes they think 80,000 Hours has made along the way
Why Ben left the CEO position
And the future of 80,000 Hours
Who this episode is for:
People who work on or plan to work on promoting important ideas in a way that’s similar to 80,000 Hours
People who work at organisations similar to 80,000 Hours
People who work at 80,000 Hours
Who this episode isn’t for:
People who, if asked if they’d like to join a dinner at 80,000 Hours where the team reminisce on the good old days, would say, “Sorry, can’t make it — I’m washing my hair that night”
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ryan Kessler and Ben Cordell
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Jeff Sebo — director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program at NYU — about preparing for a world with digital minds.
They cover:
The non-negligible chance that AI systems will be sentient by 2030
What AI systems might want and need, and how that might affect our moral concepts
What happens when beings can copy themselves? Are they one person or multiple people? Does the original own the copy or does the copy have its own rights? Do copies get the right to vote?
What kind of legal and political status should AI systems have? Legal personhood? Political citizenship?
What happens when minds can be connected? If two minds are connected, and one does something illegal, is it possible to punish one but not the other?
The repugnant conclusion and the rebugnant conclusion
The experience of trying to build the field of AI welfare
What improv comedy can teach us about doing good in the world
And plenty more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuire Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Is following important political and international news a civic duty — or is it our civic duty to avoid it?
It’s common to think that ‘staying informed’ and checking the headlines every day is just what responsible adults do.
But in today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin is joined by economist Bryan Caplan to discuss the book Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life — which argues that reading the news both makes us miserable and distorts our understanding of the world. Far from informing us and enabling us to improve the world, consuming the news distracts us, confuses us, and leaves us feeling powerless.
In the first half of the episode, Bryan and Rob discuss various alleged problems with the news, including:
That it overwhelmingly provides us with information we can’t usefully act on.
That it’s very non-representative in what it covers, in particular favouring the negative over the positive and the new over the significant.
That it obscures the big picture, falling into the trap of thinking ‘something important happens every day.’
That it’s highly addictive, for many people chewing up 10% or more of their waking hours.
That regularly checking the news leaves us in a state of constant distraction and less able to engage in deep thought.
And plenty more.
Bryan and Rob conclude that if you want to understand the world, you’re better off blocking news websites and spending your time on Wikipedia, Our World in Data, or reading a textbook. And if you want to generate political change, stop reading about problems you already know exist and instead write your political representative a physical letter — or better yet, go meet them in person.
In the second half of the episode, Bryan and Rob cover:
Why Bryan is pretty sceptical that AI is going to lead to extreme, rapid changes, or that there’s a meaningful chance of it going terribly.
Bryan’s case that rational irrationality on the part of voters leads to many very harmful policy decisions.
How to allocate resources in space.
Bryan’s experience homeschooling his kids.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire Transcriptions: Katy Moore
The idea this week: it’s incredible how dedicated many of you are to helping others.
One of my favourite parts of working on the one-on-one advising team is getting to see the important work so many people are doing up close. It’s incredibly inspiring to learn about the thoughtful, dedicated steps you’re taking to have an impact. In our conversations, we get to directly express appreciation for each person’s efforts. But we only get to do that for a fraction of readers, and only occasionally.
So I wanted to take this chance to say thank you to all of you working so hard and intentionally to help others. There are countless ways to make a difference — different problems needing solutions and different approaches to tackle them. I can’t speak to nearly all of those here. But I do want to highlight a few examples of work I know many of you are doing that I find deeply admirable.
To those working long hours at a challenging job in order to donate a significant portion of your salary to effective organisations — thank you. It’s hard to stay motivated when the work itself doesn’t feel valuable. It’s hard to make time outside a full-time job to thoughtfully decide where your money can do the most good. And it can be tough being surrounded by people with different values who get to directly enjoy the fruits of their labour rather than using it to reduce suffering.
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews award-winning investigative journalist Alison Young on the surprising frequency of lab leaks and what needs to be done to prevent them in the future.
They cover:
The most egregious biosafety mistakes made by the CDC, and how Alison uncovered them through her investigative reporting
The Dugway life science test facility case, where live anthrax was accidentally sent to labs across the US and several other countries over a period of many years
The time the Soviets had a major anthrax leak, and then hid it for over a decade
The 1977 influenza pandemic caused by vaccine trial gone wrong in China
The last death from smallpox, caused not by the virus spreading in the wild, but by a lab leak in the UK
Ways we could get more reliable oversight and accountability for these labs
And the investigative work Alison’s most proud of
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Take the White House. This week, President Joe Biden announced a sweeping new executive order to respond to the risks potentially posed by advanced AI systems, including risks to national security.
A requirement for AI labs working on the most powerful models to share information about safety tests and training plans
Direction to the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create standards for red teaming and assessing the safety of powerful new AI models
Efforts to reduce the risk of AI-related biological threats and to mitigate cybersecurity vulnerabilities
Provisions on fraud, privacy, equity, civil rights, workers’ rights, and international coordination
Vice President Kamala Harris also announced the creation of the United States AI Safety Institute this week, which will help evaluate and mitigate dangerous capabilities of AI models.
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Paul Niehaus — cofounder of GiveDirectly — on the case for giving unconditional cash to the world’s poorest households.
They cover:
The empirical evidence on whether giving cash directly can drive meaningful economic growth
How the impacts of GiveDirectly compare to USAID employment programmes
GiveDirectly vs GiveWell’s top-recommended charities
How long-term guaranteed income affects people’s risk-taking and investments
Whether recipients prefer getting lump sums or monthly instalments
How GiveDirectly tackles cases of fraud and theft
The case for universal basic income, and GiveDirectly’s UBI studies in Kenya, Malawi, and Liberia
The political viability of UBI
Plenty more
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuire Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez Transcriptions: Katy Moore
In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin speaks with repeat guest Ian Morris about what big-picture history says about the likely impact of machine intelligence.
They cover:
Some crazy anomalies in the historical record of civilisational progress
Whether we should think about today’s technology from an evolutionary perspective
Whether war will make a resurgence
Why we can’t end up living like The Jetsons
Whether stagnation or cyclical futures are realistic
What it means that over the very long term the rate of economic growth has increased
Whether violence between humans and powerful AI systems is likely
The most likely reasons for Rob and Ian to be really wrong about all of this
How professional historians react to this sort of talk
The future of Ian’s work
Plenty more
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Milo McGuire Transcriptions: Katy Moore
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Seren Kell — Senior Science and Technology Manager at the Good Food Institute Europe — about making alternative proteins as tasty, cheap, and convenient as traditional meat, dairy, and egg products.
They cover:
The basic case for alternative proteins, and why they’re so hard to make
Why fermentation is a surprisingly promising technology for creating delicious alternative proteins
The main scientific challenges that need to be solved to make fermentation even more useful
The progress that’s been made on the cultivated meat front, and what it will take to make cultivated meat affordable
How GFI Europe is helping with some of these challenges
How people can use their careers to contribute to replacing factory farming with alternative proteins
The best part of Seren’s job
Plenty more
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuire Additional content editing: Luisa Rodriguez and Katy Moore Transcriptions: Katy Moore
In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin gets the rare chance to interview someone with insider AI policy experience at the White House and DeepMind who’s willing to speak openly — Tantum Collins.
They cover:
How AI could strengthen government capacity, and how that’s a double-edged sword
How new technologies force us to confront tradeoffs in political philosophy that we were previously able to pretend weren’t there
To what extent policymakers take different threats from AI seriously
Whether the US and China are in an AI arms race or not
Whether it’s OK to transform the world without much of the world agreeing to it
The tyranny of small differences in AI policy
Disagreements between different schools of thought in AI policy, and proposals that could unite them
How the US AI Bill of Rights could be improved
Whether AI will transform the labour market, and whether it will become a partisan political issue
The tensions between the cultures of San Francisco and DC, and how to bridge the divide between them
What listeners might be able to do to help with this whole mess
Panpsychism
Plenty more
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire Transcriptions: Katy Moore
In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin speaks with repeat guest and audience favourite Anders Sandberg about the most impressive things that could be achieved in our universe given the laws of physics.
They cover:
The epic new book Anders is working on, and whether he’ll ever finish it
Whether there’s a best possible world or we can just keep improving forever
What wars might look like if the galaxy is mostly settled
The impediments to AI or humans making it to other stars
How the universe will end a million trillion years in the future
Whether it’s useful to wonder about whether we’re living in a simulation
The grabby aliens theory
Whether civilizations get more likely to fail the older they get
The best way to generate energy that could ever exist
Black hole bombs
Whether superintelligence is necessary to get a lot of value
The likelihood that life from elsewhere has already visited Earth
And plenty more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire Transcriptions: Katy Moore
A mistake I have frequently made, and still sometimes do, is not asking for help with applications. I usually feel awkward about others reading my letters or essays or practicing interview questions, and I also don’t want to waste my friends’ time.
But whenever I end up asking for help, it improves my applications significantly, and people are usually happy to help. (I enjoy giving feedback on applications as well!)
–Anemone Franz, advisor
2. Ruling out an option too quickly
I first became concerned about risks from artificial intelligence in 2014, when I read Superintelligence. The book convinced me these risks were serious. And more importantly, I couldn’t find persuasive counterarguments at the time.
But because I didn’t have a background in technical fields — I thought of myself as a writer — I concluded there was little I could contribute to the field and mostly worked on other problems.
In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Kevin Esvelt — a biologist at the MIT Media Lab and the inventor of CRISPR-based gene drive — about the threat posed by engineered bioweapons.
They cover:
Why it makes sense to focus on deliberately released pandemics
Case studies of people who actually wanted to kill billions of humans
How many people have the technical ability to produce dangerous viruses
The different threats of stealth and wildfire pandemics that could crash civilisation
The potential for AI models to increase access to dangerous pathogens
Why scientists try to identify new pandemic-capable pathogens, and the case against that research
Technological solutions, including UV lights and advanced PPE
Using CRISPR-based gene drive to fight diseases and reduce animal suffering
And plenty more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Simon Monsour Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Blog post by Lauren Kuhns · Published September 29th, 2023
The idea this week: building career capital is a key part of having an impactful career over the long term — and we have new content about some specific paths you might take.
If you want to do good with your career, we usually don’t recommend trying to have an impact right away. We think most people should spend their early career getting good at something useful.
Working in policy can be an excellent way to have a positive impact on many top problems, including AI, biosecurity, great power conflict, animal welfare, global health, and more.
The first part details the value of policy master’s degrees with a focus on the US — though some of the information is likely to apply more broadly. We think this is one of the best ways to get career capital for a career in US policy.
The second part covers specifics about how to choose which program to apply to based on reputation and personal fit, advice for preparing your application, and information on how to fund your degree.
Career review by Benjamin Todd · Last updated September 2023 · First published November 2021
In 2010, a group of founders with experience in business, practical medicine, and biotechnology launched a new project: Moderna, Inc.
After witnessing recent groundbreaking research into RNA, they realised there was an opportunity to use this technology to rapidly create new vaccines for a wide range of diseases. But few existing companies were focused on that application.
They decided to found a company. And 10 years later, they were perfectly situated to develop a highly effective vaccine against COVID-19 — in a matter of weeks. This vaccine played a huge role in curbing the pandemic and has likely saved millions of lives.
This illustrates that if you can find an important gap in a pressing problem area and found an organisation that fills this gap, that can be one of the highest-impact things you can do — especially if that organisation can persist and keep growing without you.
Why might founding a new project be high impact?
If you can find an important gap in what’s needed to tackle a pressing problem, and create an organisation to fill that gap, that’s a highly promising route to having a huge impact.
But here are some more reasons it seems like an especially attractive path to us, provided you have a compelling idea and the right personal fit — which we cover in the next section.
Blog post by Benjamin Hilton · Published September 19th, 2023
The question this week: what are the biggest changes to our career guide since 2017?
Read the new and updated career guide here, by our founder Benjamin Todd and the 80,000 Hours team.
Our 2023 career guide isn’t just a fancy new design — here’s a rundown of how the content has been updated:
1. Career capital: get good at something useful
In our previous career guide, we argued that your primary focus should be on building very broadly applicable skills, credentials, and connections — what we called transferable career capital.
We also highlighted jobs like consulting as a way to get this.
However, since launching the 2017 version of the career guide, we came to think a focus on transferable career capital might lead you to neglect experience that can be very useful to enter the most impactful jobs — for example, experience working in an AI lab or studying synthetic biology.
OK, so how should you figure out the best career capital option for you?
Our new advice: get good at something useful.
In more depth — choose some valuable skills to learn, and that are a good fit for you, and then find opportunities that let you practise those skills. And then have concrete back-up plans and plan Bs in mind, rather than relying on general ‘transferability.’
Effective altruism is associated with the slogan “do the most good.” On one level, this has to be unobjectionable: What could be bad about helping people more and more?
But in today’s interview, Toby Ord — moral philosopher at the University of Oxford and one of the founding figures of effective altruism — lays out three reasons to be cautious about the idea of maximising the good that you do. He suggests that rather than “doing the most good that we can,” perhaps we should be happy with a more modest and manageable goal: “doing most of the good that we can.”
Toby was inspired to revisit these ideas by the possibility that Sam Bankman-Fried, who stands accused of committing severe fraud as CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was motivated to break the law by a desire to give away as much money as possible to worthy causes.
Toby’s top reason not to fully maximise is the following: if the goal you’re aiming at is subtly wrong or incomplete, then going all the way towards maximising it will usually cause you to start doing some very harmful things.
This result can be shown mathematically, but can also be made intuitive, and may explain why we feel instinctively wary of going “all-in” on any idea, or goal, or way of living — even something as benign as helping other people as much as possible.
Toby gives the example of someone pursuing a career as a professional swimmer. Initially, as our swimmer takes their training and performance more seriously, they adjust their diet, hire a better trainer, and pay more attention to their technique. While swimming is the main focus of their life, they feel fit and healthy and also enjoy other aspects of their life as well — family, friends, and personal projects.
But if they decide to increase their commitment further and really go all-in on their swimming career, holding back nothing back, then this picture can radically change. Their effort was already substantial, so how can they shave those final few seconds off their racing time? The only remaining options are those which were so costly they were loath to consider them before.
To eke out those final gains — and go from 80% effort to 100% — our swimmer must sacrifice other hobbies, deprioritise their relationships, neglect their career, ignore food preferences, accept a higher risk of injury, and maybe even consider using steroids.
Now, if maximising one’s speed at swimming really were the only goal they ought to be pursuing, there’d be no problem with this. But if it’s the wrong goal, or only one of many things they should be aiming for, then the outcome is disastrous. In going from 80% to 100% effort, their swimming speed was only increased by a tiny amount, while everything else they were accomplishing dropped off a cliff.
The bottom line is simple: a dash of moderation makes you much more robust to uncertainty and error.
As Toby notes, this is similar to the observation that a sufficiently capable superintelligent AI, given any one goal, would ruin the world if it maximised it to the exclusion of everything else. And it follows a similar pattern to performance falling off a cliff when a statistical model is ‘overfit’ to its data.
In the full interview, Toby also explains the “moral trade” argument against pursuing narrow goals at the expense of everything else, and how consequentialism changes if you judge not just outcomes or acts, but everything according to its impacts on the world.
Toby and Rob also discuss:
The rise and fall of FTX and some of its impacts
What Toby hoped effective altruism would and wouldn’t become when he helped to get it off the ground
What utilitarianism has going for it, and what’s wrong with it in Toby’s view
How to mathematically model the importance of personal integrity
Which AI labs Toby thinks have been acting more responsibly than others
How having a young child affects Toby’s feelings about AI risk
Whether infinities present a fundamental problem for any theory of ethics that aspire to be fully impartial
How Toby ended up being the source of the highest quality images of the Earth from space
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.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Simon Monsour Transcriptions: Katy Moore
