By Ariel Conn
If you want to improve the world as much as possible, what should you do with your career? Should you become a doctor, an engineer or a politician? Should you try to end global poverty, climate change, or international conflict? These are the questions that the research group, 80,000 Hours, tries to answer.
To learn more, I spoke with Rob Wiblin and Brenton Mayer of 80,000 Hours. The following are highlights of the interview, but you can listen to the full podcast here or read the transcript here.
Can you give us some background about 80,000 Hours?
Rob: 80,000 Hours has been around for about six years and started when Benjamin Todd and Will MacAskill wanted to figure out how they could do as much good as possible. They started looking into things like the odds of becoming an MP in the UK or if you became a doctor, how many lives would you save. Pretty quickly, they were learning things that no one else had investigated.
They decided to start 80,000 Hours, which would conduct this research in a more systematic way and share it with people who wanted to do more good with their career.
80,000 hours is roughly the number of hours that you’d work in a full-time professional career. That’s a lot of time, so it pays off to spend quite a while thinking about what you’re going to do with that time.
On the other hand, 80,000 hours is not that long relative to the scale of the problems that the world faces. You can’t tackle everything. You’ve only got one career, so you should be judicious about what problems you try to solve and how you go about solving them.
How do you help people have more of an impact with their careers?
Brenton: The main thing is a career guide. We’ll talk about how to have satisfying careers, how to work on one of the world’s most important problems, how to set yourself up early so that later on you can have a really large impact.
The second part that we do is do career coaching and try to apply advice to individuals.
What is earning to give?
Rob: Earning to give is the career approach where you try to make a lot of money and give it to organizations that can use it to have a really large positive impact. I know people who can make millions of dollars a year doing the thing they love and donate most of that to effective nonprofits, supporting 5, 10, 15, possibly even 20 people to do direct work in their place.
Can you talk about research you’ve been doing regarding the world’s most pressing problems?
Rob: One of the first things we realized is that if you’re trying to help people alive today, your money can go further in the developing world. We just need to scale up solutions to basic health problems and economic issues that have been resolved elsewhere.
Moving beyond that, what other groups in the world are extremely neglected? Factory farmed animals really stand out. There’s very little funding focused on improving farm animal welfare.
The next big idea was, of all the people that we could help, what fraction are alive today? We think that it’s only a small fraction. There’s every reason to think humanity could live for another 100 generations on Earth and possibly even have our descendants alive on other planets.
We worry a lot about existential risks and ways that civilization can go off track and never recover. Thinking about the long-term future of humanity is where a lot of our attention goes and where I think people can have the largest impact with their career.
Regarding artificial intelligence safety, nuclear weapons, biotechnology and climate change, can you consider different ways that people could pursue either careers or “earn to give” options for these fields?
Rob: One would be to specialize in machine learning or other technical work and use those skills to figure out how can we make artificial intelligence aligned with human interests. How do we make the AI do what we want and not things that we don’t intend?
Then there’s the policy and strategy side, trying to answer questions like how do we prevent an AI arms race? Do we want artificial intelligence running military robots? Do we want the government to be more involved in regulating artificial intelligence or less involved? You can also approach this if you have a good understanding of politics, policy, and economics. You can potentially work in government, military or think tanks.
Things like communications, marketing, organization, project management, and fundraising operations — those kinds of things can be quite hard to find skilled, reliable people for. And it can be surprisingly hard to find people who can handle media or do art and design. If you have those skills, you should seriously consider applying to whatever organizations you admire.
[For nuclear weapons] I’m interested in anything that can promote peace between the United States and Russia and China. A war between those groups or an accidental nuclear incident seems like the most likely thing to throw us back to the stone age or even pre-stone age.
I would focus on ensuring that they don’t get false alarms; trying to increase trust between the countries in general and the communication lines so that if there are false alarms, they can quickly diffuse the situation.
The best opportunities [in biotech] are in early surveillance of new diseases. If there’s a new disease coming out, a new flu for example, it takes a long time to figure out what’s happened.
And when it comes to controlling new diseases, time is really of the essence. If you can pick it up within a few days or weeks, then you have a reasonable shot at quarantining the people and following up with everyone that they’ve met and containing it. Any technologies that we can invent or any policies that will allow us to identify new diseases before they’ve spread to too many people is going to help with both natural pandemics, and also any kind of synthetic biology risks, or accidental releases of diseases from biological researchers.
Brenton: A Wagner and Weitzman paper suggests that there’s about a 10% chance of warming larger than 4.8 degrees Celsius, or a 3% chance of more than 6 degrees Celsius. These are really disastrous outcomes. If you’re interested in climate change, we’re pretty excited about you working on these very bad scenarios. Sensible things to do would be improving our ability to forecast; thinking about the positive feedback loops that might be inherent in Earth’s climate; thinking about how to enhance international corporation.
Rob: It does seem like solar power and storage of energy from solar power is going to have the biggest impact on emissions over at least the next 50 years. Anything that can speed up that transition makes a pretty big contribution.
What do you suggest for people interested in creative fields?
Rob: When it comes to the Effective Altruism community, we’re fairly short on creative skills. We don’t tend to have people who are great at producing music or songs or visual design or making beautiful pieces of art or even just basically beautiful functional websites. I’m always really enthusiastic when I find someone who can do visual design or has a creative streak to them because I think that’s a very important complementary skill that almost any campaign or organization is going to need at some point to some extent.
Rob, can you explain your interest in long-term multigenerational indirect effects and what that means?
Rob: If you’re trying to help people and animals thousands of years in the future, you have to help them through a causal chain that involves changing the behavior of someone today and then that’ll help the next generation and so on.
One way to improve the long-term future of humanity is to do very broad things that improve human capabilities like reducing poverty, improving people’s health, making schools better.
But in a world where the more science and technology we develop, the more power we have to destroy civilization, it becomes less clear that broadly improving human capabilities is a great way to make the future go better. If you improve science and technology, you both improve our ability to solve problems and create new problems.
I think about what technologies can we invent that disproportionately make the world safer rather than more risky. It’s great to improve the technology to discover new diseases quickly and to produce vaccines for them quickly, but I’m less excited about generically pushing forward the life sciences because there’s a lot of potential downsides there as well.
Another way that we can robustly prepare humanity to deal with the long-term future is to have better foresight about the problems that we’re going to face. That’s a very concrete thing you can do that puts humanity in a better position to tackle problems in the future — just being able to anticipate those problems well ahead of time so that we can dedicate resources to averting those problems.
To learn more, visit 80000hours.org and subscribe to Rob’s new podcast.
Originally published at futureoflife.org