Good Robot #3: Let’s fix everything

A simple parable about a drowning child sparks a moral revolution. Is building AI the way to do the most good in the world? This is the third episode of our new four-part series about the stories shaping the future of AI. Good Robot was made in partnership with Vox’s Future Perfect team. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays and Saturdays. For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! [email protected] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's Unexplainable. I'm Noam Hassenfeld. And this week, the third episode of our series, Good Robot. If you haven't heard the first two, they should be right behind this in your feed. So just scroll back, find a comfy spot to listen, and meet us right here when you're done. Once you're all prepped and ready for me to stop talking, here is episode three of Good Robot from Julia Longoria.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Okay. On your way to work, you pass a small pond.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather's cool, though, and it's early. So you're surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child. Just a toddler, who's flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there's no one else around. The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don't wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Wading in is easy and safe. But you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her and change your clothes, you'll be late for work. What should you do?

• 3:16Speaker 04

  Breakfast will be ready shortly. Everyone's just gonna...

• 3:20Speaker 02

  So we don't have to go anywhere first before I check in?

• 3:23Speaker 05

  This past spring, I joined hundreds of people on a sort of pilgrimage to Princeton, New Jersey, to honor a man whose ideas touch people's lives in pretty profound ways. And for people who somehow haven't come across his work, how would you describe his influence? Oh, it was, um, life-changing.

• 3:45Speaker 05

  The man in question is philosopher Peter Singer. People gather to celebrate his retirement from Princeton, where he taught moral philosophy for over two decades. And he's no average professor. He got standing ovations? Like, who gets-- what philosophers get that?

• 4:02Speaker 04

  I mean, he's in the news. There are protests.

• 4:05Speaker 05

  He's what you might call a provocative thinker. And he's become a bit philosopher-famous, like a modern-day Socrates or Nietzsche, spreading his ideas far beyond the philosophy world. His writing helped inspire a TV show.

• 4:21Speaker 06

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to your first day in the afterlife.

• 4:26Speaker 05

  "The Good Place," starring Ted Danson and Kristen Bell. He's known for pushing people to think about how they can do the most good in the world.

• 4:36Speaker 07

  Got me to be vegan.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  Really?

• 4:38Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 4:39Speaker 05

  A lot of people at his retirement party had been inspired to give up eating meat, based on his writing about the moral cost of animal suffering.

• 4:46Speaker 07

  Oh, I'm looking at the vegetarian. I'm thinking, there's Peter's nature.

• 4:50Speaker 05

  Which is why the food at his retirement conference was an assortment of vegan delights: avocado toasts, broccoli.

• 4:57Speaker 07

  Real broccoli, real Brussels sprouts. It is very gassy foods all around.

• 5:02Speaker 05

  People came to this three-day event in his honor from all walks of life, from all over the globe: Malaysia, and China, and Minnesota. I spoke to local politicians, a writer, a track coach.

• 5:14Speaker 07

  How would you describe his influence in the world? Powerful, because he has planted seeds that grow and expand.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  Coach told me he buys used paperbacks of Singer's books in bulk.

• 5:28Speaker 07

  I still like to carry around paper books, especially like for travel.

• 5:32Speaker 05

  And anytime he travels, he leaves a copy in his hotel night table for the next person to find.

• 5:37Speaker 07

  Really? Yeah, like Tanzania, Botswana.

• 5:41Speaker 05

  Kind of like you'd find a Bible.

• 5:43Speaker 07

  So you just leave them there? Wow.

• 5:46Speaker 05

  And the Bible vibes are appropriate. Singer poses provocative moral questions through parables. His most famous one is the drowning child thought experiment. Some people at his retirement party knew it by heart.

• 6:02Speaker 08

  Just imagine if you walk past a pond, you're wearing a nice shoes, nice suit, and then a child was drowning. What is the right thing to do in that scenario?

• 6:15Speaker 05

  Initially, the answer seems clear.

• 6:18Speaker 09

  Obviously, I'm going to rescue the child.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  But Peter Singer asks you to take the thought experiment further. What if the child isn't right in front of you?

• 6:29Speaker 07

  What's the real significant difference between someone in a pond right next to you versus someone across the world? Assuming that it takes the same effort to save a life, no matter the distance, we should save them.

• 6:42Speaker 09

  Well, I was looking for something that would persuade people.

• 6:45Speaker 05

  That's Peter Singer.

• 6:46Speaker 09

  The current issue then was the crisis in what's now Bangladesh. And some people were saying, well, I didn't cause this. It's not my responsibility. It's someone's responsibility over there. And I was trying to think of a way of convincing people that it's still wrong not to try and prevent some great harm occurring, even if you have no responsibility for it.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  People talk to me about reading this parable for the first time, almost like a conversion moment, inspiring them to help the drowning children oceans away from them.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  I read it, and I immediately gave to several charities that I've been thinking about.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  And some people started to take the idea even further. How far should they go to save these proverbial children?

• 7:36Speaker 10

  Would there be any luxuries left in our lives if we took this seriously?

• 7:40Speaker 05

  What if there were drowning children we didn't know about? What if those children didn't even exist yet?

• 7:47Speaker 07

  What about time? Not just across physical space, but across time. This is a riddle that we can never quite resolve.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  This riddle started a movement.

• 8:02Speaker 11

  Peter Singer's Drowning Child produces the effective altruist movement.

• 8:06Speaker 12

  Effective altruism aims to use reason and evidence to do the most good possible.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  A moral movement rooted in rationality, which some rationalists found themselves gravitating toward.

• 8:20Speaker 11

  Because for me, the underlying impulse has always been, let's fix everything.

• 8:26Speaker 05

  The drowning child became a catalyst that changed the way some of the wealthiest people in the world spent their millions to fix everything.

• 8:37Speaker 13

  I think AI is one of the biggest threats, but I think we can aspire to guide it in a direction that's beneficial to humanity.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  And number one on the list of things to fix: saving the world from AI apocalypse.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  This is episode three of Good Robot, a series about AI from Unexplainable in collaboration with Future Perfect. I'm Julia Longoria.

• 9:17Speaker 14

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• 10:42Speaker 14

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• 11:26Speaker 14

  or how different astronomical discoveries got made, or how constellations got their names. You don't need serious equipment to make serious discoveries. You start with a simple question, and suddenly, you're somewhere you never expected to be. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore. At tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest-growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.

• 12:44Speaker 15

  The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defence. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate.

• 12:57Speaker 05

  You might say, a version of this story starts with a pond.

• 13:02Speaker 09

  I don't know why I thought of the drowning child. I mean, maybe I was in Oxford and a lot of the college grounds, like where I was starting to have lunch, had these shallow ponds in them, ornamental ponds.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  Peter Singer was inspired by ponds at Oxford University, where he was working.

• 13:19Speaker 09

  Maybe that's what put it in my head, but I can't really say for sure.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  And his pond story passed from one Australian philosopher at Oxford to another Australian philosopher at Oxford.

• 13:30Speaker 10

  I'm having trouble thinking of exactly where he's imagining.

• 13:36Speaker 10

  There's certainly rivers.

• 13:37Speaker 05

  Okay, maybe it wasn't a pond, maybe it was a river. Who cares? The point is, the drowning child didn't gain legs, so to speak, until this Australian philosopher entered the picture.

• 13:49Speaker 10

  Hi, I'm Toby Ord. I'm a philosopher at Oxford University.

• 13:54Speaker 05

  As a grad student at Oxford, he was assigned to write an essay about the ideas in the riddle. Who is the drowning child he needed to save? This got him thinking.

• 14:05Speaker 10

  I came to think, actually, we probably do have these duties to help people who are much poorer than ourselves, even if it requires really quite substantial sacrifices.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  That's when the drowning child seemed to go from brainy thought experiment to a moral imperative. At the time, Toby had a modest academic salary, but he was inspired to give away 10%, like a 10% tithe in the religious world, to charity.

• 14:32Speaker 10

  It was only after really sitting with it for a couple of years, actually, that I really made a decision to try to take this idea further.

• 14:38Speaker 05

  He thought, what if I got someone else to give 10% of their income? And then that person got another person to give 10%. Before long, we're saving exponentially more drowning children.

• 14:52Speaker 10

  So ultimately, I launched an organisation just after I turned 30 in 2009 with Will McCaskill, to try to encourage other people to make a similar choice.

• 15:04Speaker 10

  We started with 23 members.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  Pretty soon, Toby's group of givers tripled and then quadrupled. Peter Singer himself joined in giving and spreading the good word.

• 15:17Speaker 09

  More and more people are understanding this idea.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  Here he is giving a TED Talk in 2013.

• 15:23Speaker 09

  And the result is a growing movement: effective altruism.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  They gave the movement a name: effective altruism.

• 15:32Speaker 10

  Effective altruism was really trying to take two insights: that saving a life is a really big deal, that's the first one, and that saving 100 lives is 100 times bigger deal.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  The idea at the heart of effective altruism was a contrarian one at the time. You used to get mail from charities tugging at your heartstrings with a photo of a poor kid you could save. Effective altruism was saying, "We can't rely on warm fuzzies alone to make choices about how to do good."

• 16:03Speaker 09

  It's important because it combines both the heart and the head. The heart, of course, you felt. You felt the empathy for that child. But it's really important to use the head as well.

• 16:15Speaker 11

  So it's this very analytical approach to how to do good in the world.

• 16:21Speaker 05

  Box writer Kelsey Piper first heard about effective altruism, or PEA as it's sometimes called, in high school.

• 16:28Speaker 11

  You might already notice some parallels to what the rationalists found appealing.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  The rationalists, the niche internet community Kelsey also found in high school, led by idiosyncratic blogger and AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky.

• 16:43Speaker 11

  There was, pretty early on, a ton of overlap in people who found the effective altruist worldview compelling and people who were rationalists, probably because of a shared fondness for thought experiments.

• 16:56Speaker 11

  Thought experiments with like, pretty big real world implications, which you then proceed to take very seriously.

• 17:03Speaker 05

  Effective altruism chapters started sprouting up on college campuses across the US and the UK. It's not surprising that's when I first heard whispers of the movement in college. A time when, how can I do the most good in the world? Is a very live, soul-crushing question.

• 17:23Speaker 11

  I think it appeals to young people. I think there's something about being in college. It really feels like you can do anything. People are a lot more open to, I'm gonna radically rethink everything I'm doing with my life.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  Going off to college, Kelsey was sold.

• 17:39Speaker 11

  And I was like, yes, I want to start a chapter. And I got on a Zoom call, I think, with some organizer who was a few years older than me, who was like, here's what you do.

• 17:49Speaker 16

  Let me tell you a little secret. I say that I'm an effective altruist. That just means a person trying to be effective at altruism.

• 17:59Speaker 05

  This is an online video called Introduction to EA. A student leader stands in front of a blackboard, trying to recruit students to Berkeley's EA chapter.

• 18:09Speaker 16

  And effective altruists understand that choosing from our heart is unfair. So if we can't choose from our heart, we need some kind of framework to choose the best cause.

• 18:26Speaker 05

  The approach had three prongs. Number one.

• 18:30Speaker 16

  Tractability.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  Choose tractable causes. Ones you can actually solve in a measurable way now. Next.

• 18:39Speaker 16

  What about neglectedness?

• 18:40Speaker 05

  Choose neglected causes. That a million people aren't already trying to solve.

• 18:46Speaker 16

  Neglected causes are going to look like bad causes. They're gonna look weird. They're gonna look like fiction. That's why they're neglected.

• 18:55Speaker 05

  And finally, choose important causes.

• 18:58Speaker 16

  Importance is the product of scale and severity.

• 19:01Speaker 05

  Toby Ord came up with a calculation for importance.

• 19:04Speaker 10

  If I could save 10,000 lives instead of a single life, this was extremely important.

• 19:10Speaker 05

  Important causes saved more drowning children.

• 19:14Speaker 10

  There's an idea of a quality-adjusted life year, trying to set up a kind of universal way of thinking about health. So if you could extend someone's life in full health by a year, that would be one quality.

• 19:27Speaker 05

  So you were sort of taking this like seemingly amorphous and overwhelming problem of like poverty around the world and health problems around the world and sort of making it concrete with math, in a sense. Is that right?

• 19:42Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 16

  It's actually very, very crucial to do the math.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  By 2020, effective altruism's mathematical approach had real-world implications beyond college campuses. It had taken the philanthropy world by storm.

• 20:00Speaker 17

  This scientific approach to charitable giving and work is on the rise. It's being used by some of today's class of billionaire philanthropists.

• 20:09Speaker 05

  Billionaire Bill Gates of Microsoft, incidentally, the company that brought you Clippy, and billionaire Elon Musk, who would become the co-founder of OpenAI. They all got on board with EA's mathematical approach. EA groups vetted charities and recommended effective ones these billionaires went on to give to. In this way, EA became a sort of a check on charities. You say you do good, but how much good?

• 20:39Speaker 11

  You know, donating to charity isn't about the warm glow in our hearts of doing good. It's about the fact that there is a kid who is dying of malaria. And if you donate some money, you can save their life and then they won't be dead.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  The math has led effective altruists to spend a lot of money trying to cure malaria. Shipping malaria nets to Africa is not exactly the most innovative or provocative thing to do. But according to the EA calculus, which wanted to put hard numbers on outcomes, it was an effective choice. And when Kelsey was deciding how to do the most good in her life, she got interested in putting numbers to journalism.

• 21:20Speaker 11

  Future Perfect was sort of coming at stuff from that angle, and I found that really compelling.

• 21:24Speaker 05

  She went to work for Vox's Future Perfect. I learned Future Perfect was initially founded in an attempt to apply the EA rubric to journalism, aiming to cover issues that were important, tractable, and neglected. EA's also applied that mathematical rubric to answer another question, the biggest question that plagued me as a young 20-something, just starting out in the world.

• 21:49Speaker 11

  Their idea was, in your career, you have 80,000 hours. Spend them on something really important to you, something that will make a big difference.

• 21:56Speaker 05

  The question of, what should I do with my life?

• 22:03Speaker 18

  I got involved in the EA community in college, and it's been a really big part of how I've decided what to do with my life.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  That voice you just heard is crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. At one point, he was EA's biggest poster child, being interviewed about the movement on the news.

• 22:20Speaker 19

  I am curious, too, because you are an effective altruist. I assume that you still are. And you very publicly adopted the role of earning to give.

• 22:28Speaker 18

  Yep.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  Sam Bankman-Fried went into crypto in order to earn a crap-ton of money so he could give it away. The logic was, if you choose to be a crypto-billionaire instead of, say, an aid worker, your fortune could hire a whole army of aid workers. You might be a more effective altruist that way. Sam Bankman-Fried famously gave his money to causes like pandemic prevention, to artificial intelligence, and to journalistic outlets like Future Perfect and ProPublica.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  This morning, Sam Bankman-Fried's regret.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  And then, the news came out that this effective altruist had committed some serious crimes.

• 23:13Speaker 20

  Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison today.

• 23:17Speaker 05

  The whole fiasco cracked a bit of the mathy idealism at the heart of effective altruism. In the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, some made-up math helped him pull off one of the biggest financial frauds in US history, costing some of his victims their life savings.

• 23:34Speaker 11

  A challenge about being a very new, small movement is that, yeah, you're going to be defined by whoever the most prominent person is. And if the most prominent person is crypto fraud guy, then you've got a problem.

• 23:47Speaker 05

  Kelsey Piper was one of the first journalists to interview Sam Bankman-Fried in the aftermath. Her writing for Future Perfect was cited in his sentencing document.

• 23:59Speaker 05

  Future Perfect stopped using the money they got from Sam Bankman-Fried's philanthropic arm. Vox Media says they're waiting for a restitution fund to give the money to victims. And on a personal level, it was particularly hard on people like Kelsey.

• 24:15Speaker 11

  No, it was definitely upsetting.

• 24:19Speaker 11

  I listened to Taylor Swift's "Antihero" on repeat for like three days. Didn't do much else.

• 24:27Speaker 05

  For her, effective altruism had become more than just a guide for charitable donations or what to do with her career. It had become a way of life.

• 24:39Speaker 11

  Am I hand washing or being interviewed?

• 24:41Speaker 05

  Both, I think.

• 24:43Speaker 11

  I think there's authenticity added by the clanking ditches in the background. Okay. Then we'll watch, watch this. I do want to do that.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  When I interviewed Kelsey at her home in the Bay Area, I met several of her housemates.

• 24:56Speaker 11

  I'm Clara. I live in a weird Bay group house.

• 25:00Speaker 05

  Many of them found each other along the pipeline, from rationalism to effective altruism.

• 25:06Speaker 11

  Can you please sit in the kitchen right now? I'm trying to cook. You want the kitchen free of kettles? Because kettles are distracting to cook.

• 25:14Speaker 05

  Here in the Bay Area, they cook together, raise kids together. They live in communal group houses to save money to be able to donate to effective causes. This interconnected way they live out their values has prompted criticisms that it's a little culty. The idea is, in community with one another, they push each other to be more rational. The lines between rationalism and effective altruism begin to blur in the Bay.

• 25:43Speaker 11

  I have always thought of myself as more centrally a member of the EA community than the rationalist community, once there was an EA community.

• 25:52Speaker 05

  While I was in town, Kelsey invited me and several other out-of-towners she didn't know very well to her Shabbat dinner, where they prayed and sang.

• 26:11Speaker 11

  A lot of people make the comparison to a religion, and I think that's pretty fair. A lot of what a church offers people is the combination of a unifying philosophy. There are certain promises you have in common, and the support of a community of people who care about you, know you personally, are willing to give you a hand, help you get a job, all of that. And I think the people who are like, "It's a cult," are basically mistaken. I don't think it's a cult, but it's a religion. I'm kind of copped to that one.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  Most of the world's recorded religions have developed ideas about how the world ends, what humanity needs to do to prepare for some kind of final judgment. In the Bay Area and on Oxford's campus, effective altruists started to hear from rationalists they were in community with about what an apocalypse could look like.

• 27:17Speaker 11

  And of course, since a lot of rationalists thought that AI was the highest stakes issue of our time, they started trying to pitch, you know, people in the effective altruist movement, like, "Look, getting AI right is a major priority for charitable giving."

• 27:30Speaker 05

  In the early days of VA, Effective Altruism founder Toby Ord came across rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky's blogs, where he warned of an AI apocalypse.

• 27:43Speaker 10

  I thought that his arguments were pretty good.

• 27:49Speaker 05

  Do you have a P doom currently?

• 27:53Speaker 10

  Yeah, so it's funny. I actually, I think these uses of the word doom actually are a bit misguided.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  P doom, the rationalist shorthand for probability of doom from an AI apocalypse. Toby's not into it.

• 28:08Speaker 10

  Because doom means that it's a kind of a foregone conclusion. To be doomed means there's 100% probability that you will die. So I think it can make people feel powerless, whereas I think that these things are very much in our control.

• 28:24Speaker 05

  How effective altruism set out to save us from an AI apocalypse.

• 28:32Speaker 05

  After the break.

• 28:54Speaker 21

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• 30:26Speaker 01

  Computer, is there a replacement beryllium sphere onboard?

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Negative.

• 30:32Speaker 07

  The good people at Universal Dynamics have programmed us to put our targets at ease. So us to more efficiently facilitate their collection.

• 30:50Speaker 05

  At the Shabbat dinner, I was seated next to a 22-year-old who was very curious about my big furry microphone.

• 30:57Speaker 25

  So, can you introduce yourself? Yeah, so I'm Tom. I, it was kind of funny. So it sort of felt like I discovered I was an effective altruist rather than like being convinced to be one. I had a teacher who assigned me to read Peter Singer.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  Tom read Peter Singer's Drowning Child as a kid.

• 31:20Speaker 25

  I like decided, I don't know, at some point in high school that I would dedicate my life to trying to do as much good as possible.

• 31:29Speaker 05

  As far as how to do as much good as possible, Tom told me he recently made a big decision about that.

• 31:35Speaker 25

  I dropped out of Harvard a year ago, my junior year, and I'm now working as an ML scientist at AI hardware startup.

• 31:49Speaker 25

  We should get out of these people's house because it's past bedtime, I think.

• 31:54Speaker 05

  At that point, we had to take our conversation outside.

• 32:01Speaker 05

  You dropped out of Harvard, like, so are you, how many years out of that?

• 32:05Speaker 25

  Uh, one year. Uh, I actually would have graduated, uh, on Thursday.

• 32:10Speaker 05

  Really?

• 32:11Speaker 25

  If I'd stayed in, yep.

• 32:12Speaker 05

  Wow, okay, so you're like around 22-ish?

• 32:16Speaker 25

  Exactly.

• 32:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 25

  It was like such a hard decision. Um, like, no matter-

• 32:23Speaker 05

  The decision of like what you're gonna do with your life?

• 32:25Speaker 25

  Yeah, because no matter what you're doing, you're just like abandoning a ton of people. Fundamentally, I feel like the world is in a state of triage. In a state of what? Triage. Like, there's so much going wrong that needs to be fixed. Uh, if I'm like working on providing malaria nets in Africa, I'm in some sense, uh, abandoning like all the starving children in India.

• 32:51Speaker 25

  I can only really focus on one place. What is the place that most urgently needs my help? And, you know, I figured that it's like probably the future and like specifically the problems in the future, which might be created by AI.

• 33:04Speaker 05

  I've heard of kids Tom's age dropping out of school to go into the Peace Corps or like doing some kind of religious mission. But going to work for an AI lab to save the future wasn't intuitive to me. So why choose this route that you're on right now? Obviously, it's not, you're, you're young, you have your whole life ahead of you, but why, why choose this route?

• 33:27Speaker 25

  Um.

• 33:30Speaker 25

  You know, I don't just care about the people and animals that are alive today. I care deeply about you generations. I think about our children and our children's children and so on and so forth.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  Our children's children. Tom told me he's trying to save future drowning children from AI apocalypse. His P doom compared to rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky's, which is off the charts. Tom's is 10%.

• 34:01Speaker 25

  My, my view is that we should treat AI as-

• 34:05Speaker 25

  Being very likely to be the biggest thing ever. And treat the coming decades as the likely the most important decades in human history.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  This line, "The most important decades in human history," it's roughly a quote from a book by effective altruist founder Toby Ord.

• 34:24Speaker 10

  Our present moment is just a very tiny slice of this much longer story of humanity.

• 34:29Speaker 05

  Around the time Toby was building the effective altruist movement, trying to maximize the number of drowning children he could save. Rationalists joining the movement were trying to convince Toby that AI should be a top effective altruist priority. He wasn't convinced by their paperclip maximizer thought experiment, but he was convinced by the idea that AI could threaten the story of humanity.

• 34:54Speaker 10

  This idea about existential risk.

• 34:58Speaker 05

  What convinced him was, in a way, his own argument. The math of it all. That preventing an AI catastrophe could save not just the drowning children today, but tens of thousands of future generations. Trillions of drowning children.

• 35:18Speaker 10

  There's been about 10,000 generations of humanity so far, and it seems very plausible that there could be 10,000 or more generations to follow us.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  Toby came to believe we're living at a crucial moment in human history, where, up until now, humans have ruled the earth.

• 35:36Speaker 10

  Why is it humanity that's calling the shots on the earth and not butterflies or ravens or chimpanzees?

• 35:43Speaker 05

  We've ruled because of our smarts.

• 35:46Speaker 10

  You know, something to do with our brains, not to do with our brawn.

• 35:49Speaker 05

  What if we weren't the smartest beings on earth anymore?

• 35:53Speaker 10

  I think ultimately, the most compelling overall argument to me is that if you survey researchers on AI.

• 36:02Speaker 05

  He says AI researchers were telling him that possibility of a superintelligence smarter than us was around the corner.

• 36:10Speaker 10

  Within, I say, the next 30 years or so, that they think that that's about as likely as not. And, you know, how would we still be calling the shots? How would we not be perhaps subservient to these new systems?

• 36:25Speaker 05

  Toby wrote a book laying out these arguments. He named it "The precipice for the cliff he sees humanity sitting on at this moment in history."

• 36:33Speaker 10

  What's particularly pernicious about these existential risks is that they're something that if our generation drops the ball, there won't be any more generations.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  He thinks we can determine the long-term survival of our species. He gives this philosophy yet another ism: long-termism.

• 36:50Speaker 10

  These strong arguments that these risks were real slowly made people think, "Well, if I want to work to focus on that, what should I be doing? What charities should I be donating to?"

• 37:02Speaker 05

  So, effective altruists wouldn't just give their charity dollars to things like ending malaria. They'd also give to charity to prevent an AI apocalypse. And the way to avoid bad robots taking over the world, some people decided, was to use EA money to build a good robot. And not just good, super-intelligent, a magic intelligence in the sky. You might remember "Those are the words of the chat GPT company's founder, Sam Altman." He started his nonprofit, OpenAI, with EA charity dollars from the group Open Philanthropy.

• 37:45Speaker 05

  Charity dollars also went to OpenAI's competitor, Anthropic, whose CEO also wants to build a good robot, or, as he put it, "a machine of loving grace." And it wasn't just EA charity dollars that went toward this cause.

• 38:01Speaker 26

  Some of you may have noticed that a bunch of people in this community seem to think that AI is a big deal.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  AI also became a common career path for young effective altruists.

• 38:12Speaker 25

  Eventually, the winter of sophomore year, I remember just thinking through it and thinking like, "Oh, oh, yeah, I don't think there's really a way I don't go into AI somehow."

• 38:23Speaker 05

  22-year-old Tom went into AI with the Council of Harvard's Effective Altruism Group. And in the course of my reporting, I met many other young people.

• 38:31Speaker 07

  I'm like, wow, damn, this AI safety thing. Crap, like, do I need to work on it? Like, what can I do?

• 38:37Speaker 05

  Who, around the time ChatGPT came out, decided the most effective career at doing good in the world is going into AI safety.

• 38:47Speaker 07

  And I'm like, damn, I think I can actually move the needle on this.

• 38:50Speaker 05

  They did the math and thought saving future children from AI apocalypse was neglected, tractable, and important. Open Philanthropy told us over 410 million EA dollars have gone toward addressing risks from advanced AI, making up 12% of their total giving, roughly the same percentage that's gone toward malaria prevention.

• 39:17Speaker 10

  I guess I would say, if I try to work out my best guess of the most important issues of our time, I think AI risk is probably very high at the top.

• 39:27Speaker 05

  Wow, so it's number one above the current drowning children? You'd put it above the problems we face in the present?

• 39:37Speaker 10

  I think I would, sadly.

• 39:44Speaker 05

  I've been struggling with the math of it all. I can see how it's important to think about our long-term future. But no matter how many math problems EA people put in front of me, I have a hard time seeing how saving trillions of future children from AI apocalypse is the most important, tractable problem of our time. How does a movement built around helping in a measurable way with things like malaria nets turn to a cause that requires you to almost predict the future?

• 40:16Speaker 27

  It's almost like a religion or something, where it requires faith that good things will come without those good things being clearly specified.

• 40:26Speaker 05

  This is the criticism of ethicists like Dr. Margaret Mitchell. To them, the solvable, tractable problems are the harms AI is doing right now. Problems like bias, surveillance, environmental harms. But instead, funding often goes toward addressing future hypothetical harms.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  Or it goes toward building a superintelligence, something many ethicists don't think we should be building at all.

• 40:56Speaker 27

  It seems to be like funding for sort of fanciful ideas.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  There's one follower of long-termism who's found his way to the White House.

• 41:08Speaker 28

  This was no ordinary victory. This was a fork in the road of human civilization. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured. And we're going to take Doge to Mars.

• 41:25Speaker 05

  It was hard not to chuckle when billionaire Elon Musk talked about his goal of colonizing Mars after President Trump's inauguration. But he's not joking. When he started SpaceX, he intended it to be an insurance policy for humanity in case apocalypse strikes. It's also why he says he went into AI. It's all to protect the future drowning children.

• 41:52Speaker 29

  You know, I think this is actually fundamentally important for ensuring the long-term survival of life as we know it is to be a multi-planet species.

• 42:08Speaker 05

  The long legs of the drowning child thought experiment have taken us very far away from its original intent of trying to get us to care about a crisis in Bangladesh.

• 42:21Speaker 09

  The drowning child in the pond has certainly developed a life of its own.

• 42:25Speaker 05

  In what way? What do you mean? I went back to the author of the drowning child thought experiment, Peter Singer, at his retirement party.

• 42:33Speaker 09

  I hope that I've left a legacy in my writings, that they will lead people to think differently about what we owe people in extreme poverty in other parts of the world. That's what the drowning child in the shallow pond was supposed to suggest.

• 42:46Speaker 05

  But interpreting the parables to mean that the biggest issue of our time is saving future children from an AI apocalypse?

• 42:55Speaker 09

  I think there's been too much focus. I'm not dismissing it. I think it's good that there are some people thinking about that and working on it. But compared to some of the other problems that are around, I have the sense that people like it because it's a kind of nerdy problem that's, you know, interesting things to think about. So I think that's why it gets more attention.

• 43:17Speaker 05

  You might know that Peter Singer himself is no stranger to, shall we say, outlandish interpretations. Using his own utilitarian philosophy, he's argued that severely disabled children add suffering to the world. And it might be justifiable in maximizing happiness for the parents to euthanize them. So yeah, from where I sit, using math to maximize is not always the answer. If you stare a little too hard at the numbers, the humans begin to fade out of focus.

• 43:59Speaker 05

  When I think about the drowning child as it relates to AI, I don't think about the math. I've been thinking about something else. While reporting this story, the news broke that a 14-year-old boy in Florida named Sewell had killed himself. He'd become obsessed with a chatbot, and his last text to the bot just before he died showed that he believed ending his life on Earth would bring him closer to the bot. That's who I think of when I think of the drowning child.

• 44:39Speaker 05

  Abstracting that parable so far ahead in space and time, we risk losing sight of the drowning child right in front of us. In an attempt to save some future hypothetical children, some people in the AI industry have set out to build a good robot, a superintelligent AI, a magic intelligence in the sky, a machine of loving grace. But in selling that story and building those still very flawed systems to maybe save some future children, they've invented an industry that's creating new ponds for children to drown in today.

• 45:22Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 45:29Speaker 05

  Okay, she's eating that.

• 45:31Speaker 11

  It's Play-Doh. Oh, no. It won't hurt her. Not a great life.

• 45:39Speaker 05

  I wanted to pose all of this to Kelsey Piper after she pulled the Play-Doh away from her baby. Kelsey was the person who was my introduction to the worlds of rationalism and effective altruism. I asked her, why ignore AI harms today for the sake of some future children?

• 45:58Speaker 11

  There are lots of people who have this impression that you need long-termism or theorizing about the badness of humanity going extinct or drowning child-based philosophy to care about this. And I don't think you need any of that.

• 46:15Speaker 05

  She kindly hinted that maybe I've fallen down a bit of a philosophical rabbit hole, caught in the intellectual debates of it all and lost sight of the actual technology we were supposed to be talking about.

• 46:28Speaker 11

  So one thing I did, which was super valuable, is I tried to form an opinion that wasn't about all of the social melodrama thing on the top of the AI scene. Like, just play with the AI models and think about, like, what can they do? What kinds of things, if they could do them, do I think that would be concerning?

• 46:48Speaker 05

  Now, that's an interesting thing to do. Producer Gabrielle Burbay's ears perked up at this idea. She knows I am a sucker for social melodrama. And maybe the social melodrama has been my crutch to avoid having to form my own opinion and actually having to use the technology. That does scare me.

• 47:12Speaker 30

  So what I want you to do first is I want you to open up ChatGPT.

• 47:18Speaker 30

  And I want you to say, I'm going to give you three episodes of a series in order.

• 47:25Speaker 05

  I'm going to give you three episodes of a series. Next time on Good Robot, we feed ourselves to the machine.

• 47:42Speaker 31

  Good Robot was hosted by Julia Longoria and produced by Gabrielle Burbay. Sound design, mixing, and original music by me, David Herman. Our fact checker is Caitlin Penzimouge. Our editors are Diane Hotson and Catherine Wells. Special thanks to Larissa McFarquer, whose book Strangers Drowning was an early inspiration for this episode. And a quick note, unexplainable host Noam Hassanfeld's brother is a board member at Open Phil, but he isn't involved in any of their grant decisions. Noam played no role in the reporting of this series. If you want to dig deeper into what you've heard, head to vox.com/goodrobot to read more future perfect stories about the future of AI. Thanks for listening.

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