New York (AFP) – The effective altruism movement, which has close ties to the AI community and the companies leading the artificial intelligence boom, has drawn mainstream attention and accusations of cult-like behavior and alarmism. The hard-to-define movement is still growing, and wants to better explain its values amid bitter criticism from the Trump administration and some powerful voices in Silicon Valley. Its founding principle is to give money or time to major causes as effectively as possible; however, this intentionally dispassionate approach has at times been called out of touch.
The New York Post called it a “wacky cult,” the conservative Daily Caller dubbed it “The AI Doomsday Cartel,” and a White House memo accused it of preferring the saving of “shrimp over families.” Once little known outside the tech world and some academic and political circles, effective altruism (EA) has been in the spotlight in recent weeks after a series of warnings about AI risks. Those warnings were linked to EA. David Sacks, a venture capitalist and adviser to President Donald Trump, argued that organizations tied to EA are part of a “Doomer Industrial Complex” pushing for tougher AI regulation.
EA is deeply rooted in Silicon Valley and counts controlling AI’s dangers among its priorities. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei is considered a key figure in EA’s early days, although he now distances himself from the movement. Anthropic president Daniela Amodei, Dario’s sister, is married to Holden Karnofsky, an Anthropic employee and a leading EA proponent. The movement has also influenced researchers and staff at other AI companies, including ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, particularly those working on AI safety. The movement, which took shape about 15 years ago, is used to criticism. Wealthy EA donors have often been accused of self-importance and of believing they alone know how best to give.
“Our ideas are just strange enough that people genuinely misinterpret them sometimes, and we can do a better job explaining how effective altruism approaches hard questions and tradeoffs,” said Zachary Robinson, head of the Centre for Effective Altruism. Robinson, whose organization supports the movement without directing it, sees the scrutiny since the summer as an opportunity to open up rather than retreat, because “people are curious to learn about us now.” After growing steadily until 2022, EA was badly damaged by the collapse of cryptocurrency platform FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, once the face of EA and later convicted of fraud.
After several difficult years, “We’re on an up right now,” Robinson said, pointing to attendance at the EA Global conference in New York in mid-October. Like many at EA Global, Shanil Wijesinghe, who works at a Canadian non-profit, rejected the image of EA as monolithic. “It is a values-based movement and not an identity-based movement,” he said. “We’re all trying to do the most good, with the resources we have,” he added. Those values “can be interpreted differently, and I think we have to embrace those differences.”
EA has no leader or spokesperson. Sjir Hoeijmakers, head of the charity platform Giving What We Can, said that is a good thing, even if it means “sometimes the story doesn’t get told.” Still, he noted, “effective altruism is now a movement large enough that it’s actually really influencing the world, and that’s getting noticed.”
“I think the work that they’re doing has been quite valuable,” said Nadav Brandes, a genetics researcher also at EA Global, referring to AI safety. “Without those pioneers… nobody would still today take this issue very seriously,” he added. Brandes said he was initially skeptical when AI became a major EA cause, joining climate change and animal welfare. “It was even a little bit off-putting to me,” he recalled. “I was totally wrong about it.”
Robinson stressed, however, that EA is about more than AI. “The cause that gets the most emphasis right now is AI safety, but I think it would be false to say EA is AI safety,” he said. “If you look at the money side of things, actually, it’s been the case for many years that global health and development gets much more money than AI,” he concluded.
© 2024 AFP
