THOUGHT PRECEDES deed as lightning precedes thunder, wrote the poet Heinrich Heine. So it has proved with effective altruism (EA), an ethical doctrine cooked up by philosophers in Oxford that has gone from the ivory tower to the corridors of power with remarkable speed. Effective altruists fill Silicon Valley, staff the world’s leading artificial-intelligence companies—and alarm the Trump administration. Take those attacks as a sign of its influence.
“The United States will NEVER be an effective-altruist country,” pledges the Pentagon. The secretary of war brands the philosophy “defective altruism”; others in the administration call it “dystopian”.
Some complain that the 21st century has seen little fresh thinking. Into the void have stepped MAGA and Co, making nostalgic populism the century’s big political project. But the century’s big idea is effective altruism . As we report, what began in the 2000s as a geeky way to make charitable giving more cost-effective has changed into a movement that subjects the world to complex, even bizarre, moral calculations. For many of its adherents, the urgent ethical requirement for people who want to do good is to stop artificial intelligence from wiping out humanity. EAs’ repeated success in predicting the rapid progress of AI has been impressive, too. They have a point about the technology’s risks to humanity. On September 28th OpenAI scrapped plans to release its latest model after it appeared too dangerous in testing. Many recent safety incidents resemble scary scenarios set out on effective-altruist blogs years ago.
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EA is sociologically important, too. EAs are not numerous, but the idea has swept up a generation of gifted youngsters who have made fortunes in cryptocurrency and AI. As the technology mints more billionaires, effective altruists will channel billions of dollars to causes that will shape society. EAs helped start OpenAI and Anthropic, the leading labs, in the belief that those who understood the dangers of AI should control its development. To a degree, they now do—though, ironically, by creating more labs, and thus competition, they have probably accelerated AI’s progress. And all this has now made EA politically important. The Trump administration fears the movement will succeed in throttling AI. It has feuded with Anthropic over the firm’s refusal to let its models be used for some military purposes. That is too crude. The movement’s charitable roots are obviously praiseworthy. They hold reason in higher esteem than tradition or norms and will enthusiastically debate any topic, however controversial, in pursuit of the truth.
Leading EAs acknowledge that AI may prove hugely benign, but nonetheless want to slow its development, to reduce the chance that an unstoppable machine-brain runs amok in pursuit of goals that are “misaligned” with those of humanity. Like The Economist, EAs are committed to empiricism and, especially since they blended with the online “rationalist” community, the application of logical thinking.
