“The AI people have been right a lot” by Dylan Matthews

This post was crossposted from Dylan Matthew's blog by the EA Forum team. The author may not see or reply to comments.

Subtitle: Try to keep an open mind as the world gets increasingly wild.

The crowd at EAG 2015 (Center for Effective Altruism)

In 2015, I went to my first EA (Effective Altruism) Global. It was then on-the-record for journalists, which is a rule that got changed for all subsequent events due to my actions.

My exposure to EA at that time was mostly through people who took high-paying careers in order to “earn to give” to global health charities, which I had written about in the Washington Post. I also knew the movement cared a lot about animal welfare. I was aware that there were people worried about catastrophic risks, and specifically about AI; this had come up in a profile I wrote of Open Philanthropy (my now-employer, albeit under a new name these days). But I still broadly thought of EA as the bednets and cage-free commitments people.

I was really taken aback by how dominant discussions of AI risk were at the event. The marquee panel featured Superintelligence author Nick Bostrom, future If Anyone Builds It [...]

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Outline:

(03:31) What should I learn from bungling this?

(06:43) Listen to the people saying stuff will get weird

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First published:
April 16th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9FPxMET3W4wewwSyf/the-ai-people-have-been-right-a-lot

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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