They could provide us with enormous benefits—or bring us to the brink of disaster. What happens next hinges on whether we can figure out how to handle the risks. So, if you’re aiming at positive impact in your life, one of the best things you might do is to join the effort to make sure the most powerful technologies we are building work for the benefit of all humanity.
Here’s why.
Breakthroughs in biotechnology such as CRISPR gene editing and mRNA may give researchers the power to fight genetic disorders and infectious diseases, or even help eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitos. But this same breakneck progress in our power to manipulate biology also makes it significantly easier to unleash catastrophic pandemics, even by accident. Already, it’s possible for researchers to fine-tune and synthesize viruses known to be dangerous. Right now, only a few dozen trusted scientists are able to do this. But as costs fall, this capability could spread to thousands of people. If we keep building the tools to manufacture pandemics before we build the tools to robustly defend against them, the consequences could be dire.
Developments in AI will be no less momentous. AI systems can already explain jokes, recreate artistic styles, and use “common sense” across domains. Soon, they’ll be able to speed drug discovery and research into green energy. It looks entirely possible that this kind of progress simply won’t stop. In that case, the state of the art in AI will surpass human abilities not just in certain narrow tasks, but much more comprehensively. Advanced AI might then be used to entrench discrimination and empower dictators more effectively than ever before—or we could simply lose control of these systems altogether, just as they become too powerful to contain.
These are the two technologies whose risks we think have the greatest combination of scale, tractability, and neglect. Forecasters on Meticulous, a community prediction platform, put the risk of a catastrophe that kills at least 95% of the world’s population by 2100 from synthetic biology at 1%. For AI, that figure is 6%. Yet almost no one is working on these issues, and there is much we can do. If more dedicated people join the effort to wisely and safely navigate the risks, we can make sure they work for everyone’s benefit, now and in the future.
But what does that mean for you? What are the most impactful ways to help?
YOUR MOST IMPORTANT DECISION
If you want to make a positive difference in the world, one decision stands out above all the others: How will you use your career?
Consider climate change. Behavior changes made a real difference: Recycling averts about 0.15 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year, ditching driving altogether averts just over 2 tonnes. But there’s a limit to the good you can do with simple changes like this. You can’t drive less than never, or recycle more waste than you produce. On the other hand, donating $1000 to the very best climate-focused charities appears to avert something closer to 100 tonnes of CO2 emissions: like recycling for more than 500 years. That’s an incredible step-up. But, unless you’re extremely wealthy, your most valuable contribution could be your own time, by working directly on the issues you care about. After all, skilled and dedicated people are needed to help turn other people’s donations into real change, and donations are useful only as far as they empower people to bring about that change.
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