Is EA half AI?

Hi Andreu. The EA Forum definitely has a lot of stuff about AI because that's the hot topic to talk about, and it sure seems like a lot of people in the movement these days are focused on AI, but according to a survey in 2024, the top priority cause area for 29% of people in EA is global poverty and global health and the top priority for 31% of people is AI risk, so AI risk and global poverty/health are about tied — at least on that metric. (Another way of averaging the data from the same survey puts global poverty/health slightly ahead of AI risk.)

The last survey to ask where people in EA were donating is from way back in 2020. A whole lot has changed since 2020. For what it's worth, 62% of respondents to that survey said they were donating to global health and development charities, 27% said animal welfare, and 18% said AI and "long term". 

The 2020 survey also found 16% of people named global poverty as their top cause, while 14% said AI risks. It's interesting that this is true given where people said they donated in 2020. I would guess that's probably because, regardless of which cause area you think is more important, it's not clear where you would donate if you wanted to reduce AI risk, whereas with global poverty there are many great options, including GiveWell's top charities. So, maybe even now, more people are donating to charities related to global poverty than to AI risk, but I don't know about any actual data on that.

By the way, if you click "Customize feed" on the EA Forum homepage, you can reduce or fully hide posts about any particular topic. So, you could see fewer posts on AI or just hide them altogether, if you want. 

Also, if you want to read posts expressing skepticism about AI risk, the forum has an "AI risk skepticism" tag that makes it easy to find posts about that. You have different options for sorting these posts that will show you different stuff. "Top" (the default) will mostly show you posts from years ago. "New & upvoted" will mostly show you posts from within the last year (including some of mine!).

Strongly upvote this!

I think most, though no doubt not all people you'd think of as EA leaders think AI is the most important cause area to work in and have thought that for a long time. AI is also more fun to argue about on the internet than global poverty or animal welfare, which drives discussion of it. 

But having said all that, there is still plenty EA funding of global health and development stuff, including by Open Philanthropy, who in fact have a huge chunk of the EA money in the world. People do and fund animal stuff too, including Open Phil. If you want to, you can just engage with EA stuff on global development and/or animal welfare, and just ignore the AI stuff altogether. And even if you decide that the AI stuff is so prominent and-in your view-so wrong that you don't want to call yourself an EA, you don't have to give up on the idea of effective charity. If you want to, you can try and do the most good you can on global poverty or animal welfare, while not identifying as an EA at all. Lots, likely most good work in these areas will be done by organisations that don't see themselves as EA anyway. You can donate to or work for these orgs without engaging with the whole EA scene at all. 

Very good point on coming new to EA. Maybe hearing about different cause areas in an intro workshop then landing here and wondering if it is the Alignment Forum. It might even feel a bit like bait and switch? If this is a recurring theme for newcomers to EA, this is something that should be looked at. Not sure if anyone is tracking the funnel of onboarding into EA? If so, one might see people being interested initially, then dropping off when they meet a "wall of AI".