Today, Explained - What do we owe future humans?

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

A new wave of philanthropists wants to make charity more effective. They’re focused not just on the present day but also thousands of years into the future. Vox’s Dylan Matthews explains how “effective altruism” became a multibillion-dollar philanthropic force. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained  Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Charity, philanthropy, giving, these have been around for maybe as long as some people have had more than others. A movement called Effective Altruism claims it has improved on the original mandate, give, to give well, i.e. be smart about giving, make sure it counts. Recently, this movement has gone from relatively niche to mainstream. Consider Dylan Matthews. He's a senior correspondent at Vox who started writing about effective altruism, EA, a decade ago. He became an adherent and he did something that's big in EA ethos. He donated a kidney to a stranger. You meet a lot of people who talk a big game about doing the right thing. But once I started meeting people who talked a big game but also would go under the knife for it,

that really made an impression on me. The rise of effective altruism. Coming up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started.

It's Today Explained. Dylan Matthews, Vox Senior Correspondent. What is effective altruism? premise is that people could be doing a lot more to help others and make the world a better place than they are, and that they should try to do that in as cost-effective and efficient a way as they can. So do good and don't be wasteful in doing good. That seems pretty old school, but you're saying there are some new things. Tell me about one thing that makes effective altruism or EA different. The most important one, I think, was the focus on effectiveness and the idea that there were huge differences between the most and least effective thing you could do with your money. When I was raised in my church and I was in a fairly liberal Episcopal congregation,

we were never like crunching the numbers and saying, well, we could do this thing on hunger in our community, or we could do this thing on homelessness, but this would get this many people housed, this would get this many people fed. And that from day one has been a key part of EA. So this question about how best to give is something that I've thought about a lot. And the organization that I founded and that I'm the president of, Giving What We Can, has been set up to really address. Part of the origin story is that Toby Ord, who's one of the philosophers at Oxford, who founded the movement, there are some key inspirational documents. One of them is this long report comparing cost-effectiveness of global health interventions. So if you're a program officer

who has like a billion dollars to disperse, do you give it to buying dialysis machines in Ghana, or do you spend it on bed nets, or do you spend it on vaccinations? I had a vague sense that you should give back, you should do a good thing, but how you do it doesn't matter. And I think one of the big insights of EA as a movement was, no, how you do it matters a lot. Uh-huh. So here's a simple example, though, to start off with. So it costs about $40,000 to provide a guide dog to someone. This is one way that we can try to combat blindness in a developed country.

In contrast, it costs about $20 to completely cure someone of blindness caused by trachoma. And we could make a lot of gains by just shifting some of the goodwill that we have now toward more effective directions, as opposed to trying to increase the total amount of goodwill in the world. Not that that's bad, that's very important, but that the effectiveness and how you do it matters a lot. For a given donation, let's say a $40,000 donation, that could either provide one guide dog to someone who's blind and help them get through their life, or you could completely cure 2,000 people of blindness. This is an example of the kind of disparities you can get in terms of impact.

So it's data-driven, and in some ways that makes it seem almost inevitable in 2022, in a time where, like, we have information on effectiveness in ways that we just couldn't 30, 40, 50 years ago. Tell me a bit more about the intellectual lineage of effective altruism. Where did this begin? The two big influences were an essay from Peter Singer named Famine, Affluence, and Morality, and a book from Peter Unger named Living High and Letting Die. Singer was writing in the early 70s during the Bangladeshi independence war. After a night bomb raid on Dakar, the search for the bodies in the wreckage of an orphanage. There was massive hunger.

Pakistan was committing really horrendous war crimes, and there was massive relief efforts needed. Estimates of the dead vary. 200, 400 and more. Nobody will ever know for sure. Singer made an argument using a now familiar thought experiment of a man wearing a suit walking by a lake where he sees a child drowning. And his argument was, we would condemn that man for not rescuing the child because he was late to a meeting or he didn't want to muddy his clothes. That would be appalling to us.

And his argument was that as long as there's widespread suffering of the kind he was seeing in Bangladesh in poor countries. There are things that we could do to help them for something like the cost of an expensive pair of shoes and yet most people are not doing it and so if you're going to condemn the person who fails to save the child because it doesn't want to incur the expense of replacing the clothes then don't you yourself have to at least donate the cost of a pair of expensive shoes and clothes to those organizations that are helping the global poor?

This was, I think, a very influential argument within philosophy. It's a really bracing argument and had real practical implications, which is not always true in academic philosophy. And Peter Unger, a couple decades later, tried to sort of add some heft to it. And he wrote a whole book trying to defend this view against all the counter arguments that had emerged. And so I did philosophy in college, and I was assigned these books. And so I do have these arguments, but there was no like organization around them. You read them and you're like, you should help people in poor countries, but there was no action plan after that.

And I think part of what effective altruism was was an attempt to take those arguments and develop an action plan around them. Tell me about some of the things that you've done that would fit in this rubric of effective altruism. Yeah, I mean, I would identify as an effective altruist. I think the two big things that changed in my life as a result of encountering this were I took the Giving What We Can pledge, which is a pledge from the EA movement to give 10% of your income for the rest

of your career to highly effective charities. So I've been doing that for a number of years now and intend to keep doing that. I also, sort of inspired by a couple of people I met through EA, donated a kidney about six years ago. I got a letter from my recipient. He was on dialysis for 15 months. I'm in relatively good shape physically and have high hopes to now live perhaps 20 or 25 years with the kidney which you so graciously gave, which was an excellent match for me. Let me say again, thank you from the bottom of my heart and assure you I will take most excellent care of your kidney. That's all I can really ask. Like donating to effective charities, it's something where you can take a very small

cost for yourself and help another person a substantial amount. How much money is in the effective altruism? I don't want to call it an industry business these days, Dylan. The complex is the noun I sometimes use. Complex. There you go. There's a lot of money. The vast majority of it comes from two, not just billionaires, but sort of uber-billionaire households.

One such household is Kira Tuna and her husband, Dustin Moskowitz. Dustin Moskowitz is perhaps best known in the public as one of the roommates at Harvard of Mark Zuckerberg, who helped him found Facebook. Kiri Tuna is a retired journalist who now works full-time on the philanthropic arm of her and Dustin's fortune. We have just so much more than we need to provide for ourselves and our family,

and so giving the rest away seemed like an obvious choice. As with all billionaires, net worth varies a lot. Theirs is around $14 to $15 billion the last time I checked. The second mega billionaire is one person, Sam Bankman-Fried. You know, I was thinking about working for some animal welfare organizations. And they said, look, Sam, like we honestly, given your background, would probably prefer your money to your time. He runs a crypto exchange called FTX that has quickly become sort of one of the main places people buy and sell crypto. Fortune favors the brave. He's worth a similar amount, last I checked,

$12 to $15 billion. The John D. Dean Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which is familiar to public radio listeners, is worth about $6 billion. EA is worth about five of them. That's a lot of money. It really rapidly reshaped the philanthropic landscape in the U.S. And not just the philanthropic landscape, but like Soros and like the Kochs, Tuna Moskowitz and Bankman-Fried are very interested in political donations. The effective altruists are getting involved in politics like the Soroses and the Kochs. Where and how are they spending their money? The sort of effective altruists push into politics began kind of in earnest in 2016

out of a lot of really genuine panic about Donald Trump. The effective altruists, for a variety of reasons, worry a lot about worst case scenarios and often think that a way to do good is to prevent worst case scenarios from happening because people aren't as concerned about them as they should be. And a populist leader with autocratic tendencies getting control of nuclear weapons seemed like a worst-case scenario. So, Tuna and Moskowitz poured lots of money and overnight became one of the biggest donors to democratic campaigns and to sort of the effort to defeat Trump in 2016. They gave even more money in 2020. And by that point, Bankman Freed had become a billionaire as well, and he gave a significant

amount of money. But I think beyond general support for Democrats, something that appeals about politics to effective altruists and that has appealed to philanthropists before is that getting people you like elected and lobbying them when those people have controls over budgets that can span billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, there's really good bang for your buck there. Beyond some of these political priorities more recently, they've also been thinking more and trying to spend more money on affecting the very, very far future. The vast majority of all people who will ever live have not yet been born. So, you know, my current thoughts are that in expected value, the future is what matters.

Coming up next, effective altruism takes a sort of weird turn toward the future. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. Thank you. R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply.

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Dylan Matthews, senior Vox correspondent, donator of Kidney. We've been talking about doing good for and in the present, but there's an evolution in effective altruism, a really interesting one, that has to do with caring about the very distant future. Tell me about that. The other big sort of intellectual shift that's happened within EA is away from what people sometimes call near-termism and toward long-termism. We talked a lot earlier about global poverty, global health,

making sure that people living right now in the poorest places on earth are better off. That was never the sole focus of Effective Altruism. One other major focus has always been animals and factory farming. I think that gets less attention just because in the general public, the idea that pigs or chickens being tortured in factory farms have comparative moral worth to human beings living lives of extreme desperation is controversial. But that's always been something that the major sort major EA donors have cared about as well. In the last five to six years, there's also been more focus on long-termism

and the long-term future of the world generally. So the reasoning here is humans are a pretty young species. Homo sapiens emerged about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. Mammal species like us typically live at least a million years. We're smarter than a lot of mammals, and so you might expect that to be even longer for us. That implies that the vast majority of people who will ever live will live in the future.

Future generations matter. Future people matter. And whatever you value, whether that's, you know, well-being or happiness, or maybe it's accomplishment, maybe it's great works of art, maybe it's scientific discovery, almost all of whatever you value would be in the future rather than now. Because the future just could be vast indeed. And so one way that this concern manifested itself is trying to focus much more on preventing human extinction. And that's something that I think is intuitively good to a lot of people, but is underinvested in.

That there's really not that much money going into efforts to prevent nuclear war, the spread of nuclear weapons, efforts to prevent pandemics, efforts to regulate new technologies that could be really dangerous like ai and so i think this kind of long-termist perspective pushed ea's into caring more about those things i think what's interesting about what we owe to the future which is the new book by will mccaskill one of the founders of effective altruism and is is his kind of like treatise for long-termism is that he's trying to argue that caring about all these billions or trillions of humans who will live in the future doesn't just mean trying to make sure that they exist at all, that we don't blow ourselves up before they can come to exist, but that we might have ways to make their lives better from here. There are enormous risks that we face or threats that we face that we need to manage.

But if we do, then we can create a world that is flourishing and vibrant and wonderful for our grandkids, for their grandkids, for their grandkids. Dylan, I don't have kids, although I care a lot about the world that my nieces and nephews are going to grow up in. I care a lot about the world that my nieces and nephews are going to grow up in. I care a lot about the world that their kids will grow up in. And to be honest, my brain does not go much further than that. And so a question I would have for effective altruists like William McCaskill, why should I be concerned about the life of someone who's living 100,000 years or 200,000 years from now? The moral argument they would make is throughout human history, we've been kind of gradually expanding the people that we care about. There was a time when people cared a lot about their immediate family and not much beyond

it. There was a time when they cared about sort of their tribe or their clan and not much beyond that. The advent of religions and nations provided sort of another level to care about that you might care about fellow Christians or fellow Muslims or fellow Franks or fellow Gauls, that that is gradually expanded. It's 1917 and the 69-year drive by women for the right to vote is climaxed by this appeal at the White House. And it's expanded for men to start treating women as worthy of moral concern, to ask people in dominant racial groups to care about other racial groups

and view them as worthy of equal moral concern. Congress passes the most sweeping civil rights bill ever to be written into the law and thus reaffirms the conception of equality for all men that began with Lincoln and the past were kind of dismissed felt distant. that if you care about people around the world right now who you've never met, who may be radically different from you, that the difference in space might not be any more significant or any less significant than the difference in time between someone like you now and someone like you centuries or millennia into the future. Maybe you buy that, maybe you don't. But I think the argument is that a lot of progress in society has come from starting to take seriously groups that weren't taken seriously before,

and that ourselves in the future might be a group like that. And I wonder if we could talk about what McCaskill refers to as plasticity, or the idea that at a certain point, systems become entrenched. And so if you're living in a time when the systems are not yet entrenched, you got to be very careful. Can you talk a little bit about the bad future that could happen 100,000 years from now if you and I decide today that we don't really care about much? Part of McCaskill's motivation is that you can look at examples thousands of years in the past

and see how lock-in like that happened. Christianity has persisted a lot in the West. Islam and Confucianism around the world have had millennia-long influences. You can debate how positive or negative those have been, but it stands to reason that we could be locking in things right now. And so if you lock in norms around people not having any privacy from state surveillance, that could have really negative long-term repercussions. If you lock in sort of

anti-democratic norms, the way it's happening in more and more large countries around the world, and manage to have that persist, as it did in the early days of states when government was kind of a new thing. It took a while for democracy to really flourish. If that locks in for the next few thousand years, that could have really profound negative repercussions. The more out there thing that he worries about is AI is progressing very, very quickly. that could be a very powerful force for social control. We are witnessing the rise of AI. If we mess it up, what I envision is Terminator 2, right? The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare, the war against the machines. with AI now, we might lock ourselves into systems where Terminator 2 is not, I know this sounds insane, but Terminator 2 is not just a movie. It's the world that we live in. No fate.

No fate but what we make. Yeah, AI safety is an increasing focus of EAs and long-termist EAs specifically. They're sort of like cutting-edge AI systems right now, are mostly not changing the world, but these things grow exponentially. And you project out five, 10, 50, 100 years, you may have some super powerful systems. And it can sound very out there, and it is to some degree. And I think some of it is hard because we reach for metaphors that are at hand, like Terminator, but it could be much weirder. There's been some proposals recently because Chinese and Russian nuclear response has gotten a lot faster to, instead of having U.S. second-strike nuclear weapons run through the White House, to have them controlled by an AI system that can respond faster. That's an interesting idea, and it is one that makes the quality of that AI system incredibly important to the survival of humanity. I think just as AI gets more advanced, we're going

to turn more and more systems over to it, and we're going to do it without a full understanding of what those systems can do and what they can't do, and ways in which they are and aren't aligned with what we want them to do. So an analogy is often given between the rise of Homo sapiens from the perspective of the chimpanzees, where Homo sapiens were just smarter. They were able to work together. They just had these advantages. And that just means the chimpanzees just have very little say in how things go over the long term.

Basically, no say. But that could happen with AI as well. We could be, to the AI systems, what chimpanzees are to humans. Is this the first time in human history that we've thought of future people? Like, where does this fit in the grand scheme of how humanity has thought about itself? We're fairly early on in the process of thinking about this future in a secular way. The long-term future of the material, corporeal Earth was not super important under a lot of Christian worldviews because this is an earthly, limited plane and your true life is in heaven with the Lord. And I think that worldview limited how you could think about the earthly plane as something that was of prime importance.

The idea that our fate on earth is really what matters does strike me as fairly new relative to the religious background of countries like the US andS. and U.K. So I don't think we should expect anyone in effect of altruism or long-termism to have anything like the final or best answers to these questions. What I find interesting is the choice to pose the questions and to be open to being wrong about them, but to insist that they're important and worth asking. Today's show was produced by Miles Bryan and edited by Matthew Collette. It was engineered by Efim Shapiro, and it was fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. If you liked today explained, then you're probably a fan of unique and interesting stories, just like me and Sean and the rest of our team here. So allow me to tell you about Pocket.

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