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International cooperation is essential if we want to capture the benefits of advanced AI while minimizing risk. Brian Tse, a policy affiliate at the Future of Humanity Institute, discusses concrete opportunities for coordination between China and the West, as well as how China’s government and technology industry think about different forms of AI risk.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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In this academic session, Zach Groff, a PhD student at Stanford University whose research areas include welfare economics, discusses a 1995 paper which argued that nature contains more suffering than enjoyment. After analyzing the model used in that paper, Groff found that an error negated its original conclusion, and that evolutionary dynamics imply that enjoyment may predominate for some species. In addition to this result, Groff also discusses suggestions for empirical study of wild animal welfare.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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The United States is underprepared for a catastrophic pandemic. A recent simulation conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security found that an engineered pathogen could overwhelm U.S. and global response capacity, killing more than 150 million people within 20 months. One important reason: The U.S. lacks the capacity to manufacture medical countermeasures (MCMs) fast enough to contain a global outbreak.

In this academic session, Daniel Gastfriend, a recent visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, discusses three categories of emerging technologies that could improve our MCM production capabilities: flexible manufacturing, platform technologies, and localized distributed manufacturing.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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The Open Philanthropy Project has recommended over $90 million in grants for farm animal welfare work around the world. What have they learned? In this talk, Lewis Bollard, who heads Open Phil’s work on animal welfare, shares lessons that could be useful to anyone working in that area, or on grantmaking and policy work more generally.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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Over the last five years, the EA movement has grown to influence a substantial fraction of all funding within animal advocacy. However, we still struggle with a lack of strong evidence behind many of the field’s most common interventions. In this talk, Leah Edgerton, the executive director of Animal Charity Evaluators, discusses strategies we can use to gather more evidence in the long term and avoid overconfidence in the short term.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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In the long run, we want machine learning to help us answer open-ended questions like “Should I get this medical procedure?” or “What are the risks of deploying this AI system?“ Currently, we only know how to train ML systems if we have clear metrics or can easily provide feedback on the outputs. Andreas Stuhmueller, president and founder of Ought, wants to solve this problem. In this talk, he explains the design challenges behind ML’s current limitations, and how we can make progress by studying the way humans tackle open-ended questions.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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Our elected officials control billions of dollars in spending and make policies that affect millions of people. But we choose them through plurality voting, a system that encourages extremism and forces many voters to choose between their favorite candidates and those who actually stand a chance.

In this talk, Aaron Hamlin of the Center for Election Science discusses approval voting, a method which works much better without adding complexity, and how the Center plans to implement it across the country (they’ve already won a landslide victory in Fargo, North Dakota).

Aaron also recommends this podcast: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-reform/

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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Ballot initiatives have allowed many groups in the United States to achieve policy outcomes outside the traditional legislative process. In this talk, Peter Hurford, a co-founder and researcher at Rethink Priorities, describes how the EA movement can generate change through the initiative process by matching effective policies to promising states and cities.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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If we want to improve the world (and ourselves), we need to start by changing the way we live — our habits and behaviors. In this talk, Spencer Greenberg, founder and CEO of ClearerThinking.org, discusses ways that behavior change matters and techniques we can use to get better at it.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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The potential upsides of advanced AI are enormous, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be distributed optimally. In this talk, Cullen O’Keefe, a researcher at the Center for the Governance of AI, discusses one way we could work toward equitable distribution of AI’s benefits — the Windfall Clause, a commitment by AI firms to share a significant portion of their future profits — as well as the legal validity of such a policy and some of the challenges to implementing it.

To learn more about effective altruism, visit effectivealtruism.org

This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: San Francisco. You can learn more about these conferences at eaglobal.org.

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