Edit: Some people have pointed out that this post fails to make an argument for why AI shouldn't be 80,000 Hours' core focus, and I think that's a fair criticism. I don't want people who are concerned about AI to think I'm dismissing their concerns. At this time, I'm still quite uncertain about the topic so I don't feel committed to any view regarding AI. This post is more about processing my frustration about losing a meta-EA org.
This is a crosspost from my blog.
For as long as “effective altruism” has been a term, 80,000 Hours has been one its most important organizations - introducing new people to EA’s core ideas and helping them to find impactful careers.
Since March 2025, this has no longer been the case. This is because 80,000 Hours now primarily focuses on funneling people into careers in AI with the assumption that humanity is on the verge of AGI, which they believe could determine humanity’s future, possibly by bringing about either utopia or apocalypse.
I think this is a deep loss for EA, and I wanted to share some reasons why:
1. There’s no longer a good resource to introduce people to EA.
80,000 Hours’ career guide and its problem profiles used to be the very best resource for introducing people to the core ideas behind EA and motivating them to pursue impactful careers.
Now that it has an AGI worldview baked into its content, it no longer really fulfills that purpose since it’s about AI rather than EA.
This is quite sad to me given that, for a long time, 80,000 Hours was my favorite website, and I used to mention it to people quite often.
Now, I feel quite uncomfortable sharing it with people.
For those looking for alternative resources, Probably Good is an EA career advice site that’s similar to how 80,000 Hours used to be, although it has a lot less content.
The Intro to EA page is also quite good.
2. EA should be about diversity of thought
Since EA is about finding the most effective ways to do good, I think that diversity of thought is paramount to its success as a project. This is because you really can only expand and refine your worldview in a responsible way when you engage with people who disagree with you or offer different perspectives.
Given that 80,000 Hours puts the imminence of AGI as the background assumption to its content, it cuts off virtually all other worldviews about what “doing the most good” should look like.
In the worst case scenario, if 80,000 Hours turns EA into just another AI worldview, that strips EA of its fundamental value as “the science of doing good.”
3. Less people are discovering EA now.
According to the EA Survey 2024, 80,000 Hours was the second most common way that people learned about EA.
Since 80,000 Hours now focuses on funneling people into AI safety rather than EA, the EA movement will need to find new ways to gain attention.
4. 80,000 Hours’ content is increasingly bizarre, which is bad for EA.
80,000 Hours’ problem profiles page has 14 cause areas highlighted.
Of these, roughly eight are very esoteric and strange. (“Extreme power concentration [from AI],” “Engineered pandemics,” “Moral status of digital minds,” “Gradual disempowerment,” “S-risks,” “AI-enhanced decision making,” “Space governance,” and “Wild animal suffering”).
I would feel pretty uncomfortable endorsing these ideas at a party, and I imagine you would be too.
Overall, I think that EA’s willingness to approach topics that are unusual is one of its strengths because it allows it to identify important problems that others overlook.
At the same time, it seems like 80,000 Hours has gone too far in this direction. Since 80,000 Hours still represents EA to some degree, this is bad for the movement.
It’s important to be willing to entertain ideas even if they sound a bit unusual, but putting a large spotlight on the movement’s most bizarre ideas is a bad idea.
For one, it implicitly endorses the idea that the more strange an idea is, the more likely it is to be impactful. This turns EA as a project into a search for increasingly bizarre ideas by setting bizarreness as a goal rather than a happenstance.
For two, it pushes away people with normal worldviews and only selects people with a high openness to very strange ideas. This reduces EA’s impact by reducing the size of the movement. It also eliminates the movement’s ability to orient towards the truth by reducing internal pushback to its ideas.
Hey, writing in my personal capacity (but gave others from 80k the chance to suggest edits).
I want to write a comment that’s a bit more raw than usual. I think I might die, because we don’t have control of AI. And I think you might die, and also my parents and also everyone else. Potentially very very soon.
It is a terrible position for the world to be in.
I can’t imagine being excited about an EA that looks at those facts and doesn’t jump into action. Obviously you might disagree with those facts! Great, let’s argue about that. This post doesn’t try to argue for or against x-risk, or try to take the view of why 80k might do this.
I’ve heard this argument, that EA is about finding and thinking about the most effective ways to do good. That seems right and good to me. But surely it is also about doing them.
I’m not saying I’m not excited for people to just be engaged in asking the question, I am! For instance I’m on the board of NEST.
But from my perspective, this post, which I want to recognize cares about protecting something I hold very dear, is missing a very serious mood.
I don’t think 80,000 Hours cuts off other worldviews about doing the most good, I think it has an opinion about what doing the most good, right now, on October 27, 2026, looks like. 80,000 Hours has always had opinions about that, it’s had a ranked list for over a decade.
As for esoteric concerns, I think you and I just disagree about how to relate to them, but for what it’s worth, I think e.g. engineered pandemics and extreme power concentration (imagine Trump or some other head of state, especially a dictator, with a superintelligent army) are potentially extremely extremely near to hand.
Hi Chana,
Thanks for taking time out of your day to respond to my post, and I appreciate your honesty.
To be clear, I have spent a significant amount of time looking into AI. I have read most of 80k's AI content and seen many of your podcasts and all of the AI In Context videos (as well as a lot of other AI content), and I still find myself feeling that I would need to research the topic a lot more to feel convinced about risks from AI takeover. Given this, it's not that I think that AI takeover won't happen as much as I don't have a strong view either way, and I feel I need to research the topic more.
Given this, I was writing the post with the assumption that AI takeover should not be EA's dominant focus, and I definitely understand your criticism that I haven't sufficiently made the argument for that assumption.
I want to make clear that I'm very sympathetic to concerns about AI takeover, and I don't want people at 80k to feel that I'm dismissing their work.
As someone with a more vanilla EA worldview, my intent in writing this was to process my frustration for losing a meta EA org, not to invalidate the work of others.
I have added an edit to the top of the post to make these caveats and my intent clear. I apologize for not initially including them. Thanks for responding so thoughtfully.
That said, I do think many of the problem profiles really are very esoteric in that, if we were to re-play the 21st century, it's unlikely most of these concerns would be discovered/created.
For instance, Forethought's work, which inspired the "AI-enhanced decision making profile" and, to some extent, the "Space governance" and "Extreme power concentration" profiles is very bizarre and only makes sense in context to the mythology created by FHI. For instance, one of their recent articles is "A nightwatchman on every probe: Superintelligent surveillance to prevent galactic anarchy." To me, this is a very fringe idea that has many assumptions about the future and the extent to which we can influence it baked into it. I think that much of Forethought's work is a concerning departure from the very evidence-based roots of the movement and the significantly researched concerns about AI, and I think their work is indicative of an extreme echo chamber.
Given this, I do think it's problematic for 80,000 Hours to highlight their work given how fringe and speculative it is.
It feels like EA has, at its edges, a tendency to push towards increasingly unusual topics, but it's important to not let that be motivated by social factors rather than evidential ones. (For instance, there is actually strong evidence that shrimp are sentient. The same cannot be said for whether we need to start coming up with considerations for what principles should be baked into superintelligent interstellar probes.)
Also, despite spending a couple of hours looking for it, I have been unable to find evidence that engineered pandemics are a mainstream concern among biosecurity experts, which makes me pretty skeptical that we should be concerned about them.
I agree that GHD and neartermist interventions are far easier to collect evidence about (e.g. you can just run RCTs!) but I think that doesn't mean we should avoid thinking about speculative and future-oriented things.
Re being an echo-chamber, it is true that there is a very small (but growing!) set of people thinking about the intelligence explosion and what it might entail. I'm glad to see more and more people taking AI seriously and thinking about what RSI would mean and what risks it poses. The alternative to us publishing work like this is just leaving it in google docs that 'echo chamber' people comment on. So I think where possible and not infohazardous to do so, sharing work like this publicly is useful. I'd be happy to see thoughtful critiques of the piece! Though I expect we have fundamental enough disagreements (e.g. about the legacy of FHI - to me it seems like it was a prescient and very generative place) that it would be hard to double-crux.
(I co-wrote the Nightwatchmen article.)
Hi Oscar,
I do think that taking the future into account when making decisions is important and that this process can inevitably come down to a lot of subjective speculations. For instance, when comparing the importance of alternative proteins to other approaches for helping animals, the best we can really do is making subjective predictions.
That said, I think that Forethought goes too far with its speculation by attempting to approach a vast space of future possibilities with minimal revision and external dispute about its ideas. To me, it seems like, if any of the ideas discussed by the authors were approached by different people, very different conclusions and visions of the future would be come to because the organization's approach to outlining the future is methodologically flawed. For this reason, it doesn't seem like virtually any of the research would pass peer review.
If I have time, it would be very interesting to critique the piece and hear your thoughts!
Also, thanks for the cordial response given my criticism of your piece. I wasn't expecting that you'd see my comment.
Thanks :)
That makes sense, yes I think there is something of a rigour-importance tradeoff where some of the most important questions are hard to address as rigorously. Probably even in global development, where things you can do RCTs on are great, but improving economic growth is far harder to rigorously measure and analyse.
One of my worries with articles like the one we wrote is that most of this can just be left to figure out after we have solved alignment and are in some sort of long (or short) reflection period. I still find it useful to think about these big picture strategy futurism things sometimes even if any answers we come to will need to be somewhat tentative and to-be-revised.
Appreciate your engagement here and the caveat you left at the top of the post <3
This is an passionate reply which makes a lot of sense but to some extent attacks a strawman.
The post wasn't trying to argue over which cause was most important (although he did wade into that). It primarily argues that
1. We lost our best resource to introduce neutral people to EA. Like the OP there are very few people I can now refer to 80,000 hours
2. Diversity of thought about cause-priority is important in EA, and previously seemed to be part of the ethos of 80,000 hours.
Having a ranked list with AI safety clearly at the top is very different from deliberately encouraging everyone to work on AI risk
Again I think you guys are doing amazing work and love the energy of this reply, I just think it argues a different point from the OP. Of course 80,000 hours has every right to do what it wants and may well have made the right decision, despite the cost.
Yeah I agree there's a central claim which is "80k switching to AI is a loss for cause neutral EA" which I basically agree with (and then think is right for the world, ala Matt Reardon's comment) but I do think it would be harder to have this orientation if you thought AI risk was really imminent / severe / etc, and so that's where the real crux is.
Yeah, I agree with Chana.
I think that, if there is some cause area that is distinctly more important than all other cause areas, it would make a lot of sense for 80k to simply shift to focusing on that cause area.
Like, if 95% of virologists thought an engineered pandemic could wipe out humanity in the next ten years and 80k shifted to just focusing on preventing engineered pandemics, I wouldn't be saying that that is a "loss" for EA.
That said, in general, it seems very hard to compare cause areas because of the epistemic limitations we face in predicting the consequences of our actions, in understanding our world, and in determining how to act under different kinds of uncertainty. As such, I generally would prefer 80,000 Hours to be more cause neutral.