Ari Schulman in The New Atlantis:
Shouldn’t charity serve the needs of recipients, not givers?
Isn’t it better to do more good than less?
Shouldn’t there be some way to measure that?
Effective altruism is the philosophy that answers “yes” to all these questions. Put this way, it sounds entirely innocuous. So why was it one of the hottest ideas in tech circles in the 2010s? And why is it playing a central role in so many Silicon Valley controversies of the 2020s?
If we use headlines as our guide, effective altruism has fallen from grace. One of its leaders, Eliezer Yudkowsky, also a founder of AI safety research, notoriously called in Time last year for global limits on AI development that are enforceable by airstrikes on rogue data centers. Sam Bankman-Fried claimed it as a motive for what turned out to be his multi-billion-dollar fraud. It reportedly drove board members of OpenAI to fire Sam Altman over concerns that he wasn’t taking AI safety seriously enough, a few days before some of them were pushed out in turn. And it has spurred the pro-AI backlash movement of “effective accelerationism,” which regards effective altruism as the second coming of Ted Kaczynski.
In public view, effective altruism shows up as a force of palace intrigue in the halls of Silicon Valley. And it is losing the favor of the court.
More here.
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