The Golden Age of Impact

Crosspost.

The world is advancing at a crazy clip. AI is going gangbusters, poised to potentially be the most transformative technology in history. Philanthropists are flushed with cash and short on ways to spend it. As a result, this is an amazingly good time to do impactful things with your life. Here I will suggest three things you should do.

1 Tailwind

Coefficient Giving just launched Tailwind, a grant program for ambitious AI safety startups. Matt Beard summarizes:

I have good news: Coefficient Giving just launched Project Tailwind, a call for exceptional founders to launch ambitious new AI safety initiatives, with $200k to $2 million in pre-seed or $2-20+ million in seed funding available. They list dozens of concrete ideas for new nonprofits or startups they’d be excited to potentially fund, including rogue incident detection, agreement and verification technology, a misalignment red team, talent and convening organizations, and more. You can apply today.

AI safety work is kind of a no-brainer. Experts generally think AI has a non-trivial chance of ending the world. It pays well, about as well as finance. You can get very rich working to avert a potential apocalypse. Much of the low-hanging safety fruit is unpicked. If a career is impactful, meaningful, and pays well, it seems like the kind of career that’s worth looking into.

Not everyone has the relevant skills. But if you do, consider applying. Given how flushed with cash EA is now with all the Anthropic funding coming in, my guess is that founding an AI safety startup is much more impactful than almost any earning to give job—even one making many millions of dollars a year.

Anecdote: one of my best friends started a company working on making the intelligence explosion go well. It’s now worth many tens of millions of dollars, potentially soon to be hundreds of millions, and it’s also having an incredibly positive impact.

2 Charity entrepreneurship

Charity Entrepreneurship is taking applications for those who want to start high impact animal charities. To apply, you don’t have to have an original idea for such a charity. You just have to be willing to work to incubate an impactful animal charity. Applications close September 13th.

The animal welfare space, like the AI safety space, has a lot more money than good ways to spend its money. We need many new people working to start incredibly impactful animal charities. Some CE-incubated charities have single-handedly benefitted over ten billion animals. A few people really do make an incredible difference.

Billions of animals cry in horrible agony in dark, desolate nightmare cages—knowing neither joy nor kindness, their daily existence defined by constriction and confinement and pain. By working for a new animal charity, you can benefit millions of animals in expectation. You can help free these poor defenseless creatures from their confinement. You can do something enjoyable and meaningful and good.

3 80,000 hours

80,000 Hours has an extremely useful career guide. In it, they summarize how to have an impactful career. If you want to have an impactful career, you should read—or at least skim—their career guide.

They also have a job board. This is a board full of jobs that are impactful. If you want to have impact, you should consider applying for one of the impactful jobs that want to hire people! There are a lot of jobs here—they’re not all AI safety—so consider applying for one of these even if you aren’t planning to do safety.

Now, one thing you might be thinking: “I already have a good job that pays well—I’m not going to quit.” But I think you should consider quitting. Given how much new cash there is in EA, donations have gone down massively in value relative to having high impact careers. Thus, you can massively increase your impact by getting an EA job. Just being, say, a guy in finance who gives some of your money to effective charities is nowhere near as valuable as getting one of these EA jobs.

4 Student EA clubs

Suppose that you’re still in college. What can you do?

Answer: start an EA club at your university. If it already exists, work hard, spending many hours a week, making it ridiculously good and well run. You can also host the meetups through the new Scott program for EA meetup organizing.

Suppose that doing so gets one more person into EA counterfactually. Congratulations, you have now doubled your lifetime impact. And it’s plausible that you can get many more people than that into EA. You can also consider running other groups. For more about why this sort of thing is good, you can read my post here.

5 Conclusion

It wouldn’t surprise me if there were many people reading this who could do things many times more impactful than giving billions to effective charities if they put their minds to it. We are at an unprecedentedly crazy time. AI is upending the world—in a few years, we may have extremely rapid economic growth and AI that poses serious existential risks. This may literally be the best time in history to have a positive impact, so the least you can do is make a serious attempt to make the world a better place, while the youthful hue sits on thy skin like morning dew.