Save Who You Can, While You Can

The window to do good may be closing

Schindler’s List ends with a particularly heartbreaking and surprising scene. Oskar Schindler, having saved 1200 Jewish lives in the Holocaust, must flee west to avoid capture by the Russians. Faced with many people who now live because of his sacrifices, you might expect him to feel a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment - but he instead breaks down into tears.

Tragically, he doesn’t see all the good he did, and instead only sees all the good he didn’t do. He laments that he didn’t go just a bit further.

“Why did I keep the car? That’s ten more people right there. Ten people. Ten more people. This pin, two people. This is gold. Two more people It would’ve given me two more, at least one”.

When doing something cruel, the regret often comes soon after. It usually doesn’t take long to see the negative impact an insult, broken promise, or selfish act has. However, failing to do something good is usually more of a slow burn. It’s often only after opportunity passes us by that we reflect and admit that, actually, we could’ve left more of ourselves out on the field. A change of heart only comes when we can no longer make a difference. Wrongdoing can often be resolved by making amends, but a missed chance to make the world better feels more like a permanent failure.

The time, then, to determine if there’s more that we can be doing to improve the world is now, not after the moment is gone and the lives we could’ve saved are lost. As it happens, I think we are in a unique era for helping others. There has never been a better time for altruism - and there may never be a better time again.

The Situation We’re In

If you follow this blog, you are probably aware of some of the statistics around Effective Altruism and Charitable giving. If you’re not, here are some relevant numbers

• By giving to the most effective charities, you can save a human life for ~$5000.

• By giving to the most effective animal charities, you can make an enormous impact. For a single dollar, you can prevent about 10 years of factory farming. Depending on where you donate, you can also have the knock-on positive impact of reducing antibiotic resistance, zoonotic diseases, environmental impact, and waste runoff. Ending factory farming not only helps prevent one of the worst things ever from happening, it helps us too.

So, while we feel like we might not be in a similar situation as Oskar Schindler, we kind of are. Except those that need our help aren’t being killed by fascists, they’re being killed by Malaria, Vitamin A deficiency, and Slaughterhouses.

Perfect Timing

We have incredible amounts of influence over the world compared to those alive hundreds of years ago. The further back you go, the less able your average person was to help someone in another continent, country, or even town. Go to your average medieval peasant and ask them to provide clean drinking water to someone on the other side of the world, and they’ll tell you to piss off for two reasons:

1. They don’t even have that shit themselves. Basically everyone was poor.

2. Even if they did have the resources, there was no network to help others if they tried.

This was true for basically all human history. We’ve been around for 250,000 years, and the amount of time you could reliably help others by donating money to some organisation is like what, 100 years? We are more connected now to every other person in the world than almost anyone who’s ever lived, and that provides a unique opportunity for us to help.

Additionally, we’re not poor medieval peasants anymore. There are, of course, people in the western world still living below the poverty line, but most people (and certainly most people scrolling through a phone reading my blog) have their basic needs met, and at least some expendable income. We not only have channels to send resources through, most of us have some resources to send. This feels normal, because it’s what we’re used to, but historically this is a very novel situation.

I also feel like it’s a fleeting one.

On the Precipice

AI is obviously a very controversial technology. A huge number of people see it as a kind of slop machine. Because we spend so much time on the internet, and the internet is slowly being taken over by em dashes and Pixar profile pictures, our general impression is that AI doesn’t provide much in terms of actual value. Some may even consider it a passing fad.

However, using LLMs to write slop LinkedIn posts is a tiny sliver of what the new technology is actually capable of. The protein folding problem, for example, was inscrutable for decades until DeepMind set their eyes on it and provided millions of protein structures to the world for free. This has turbocharged our ability to design new drugs and medicines. AI is also being used to boost crop yields, improve recycling sorting, and predict malaria outbreaks. We’re now solving problems in ways that were totally unfeasible 10 years ago.

What does another 20 years of progress look like? Another 30? It’s not like it’s certain we’ll be living in some sort of utopia, but when we’re already doing so much with current gen AI, and expert forecasters are putting the arrival of General Intelligence somewhere in the next 10 years, it’s hard to see how the world won’t be drastically different by 2040. Maybe it’ll be awful, maybe it’ll be perfect, maybe we’ll all be wiped out - but it will be different.

Which means we can’t count on this window for altruism to stay open. When the game changes drastically, we may find the incredible returns our donations have dwindle. If lab-grown products wipe out factory farming, for example, there’ll be no more animals left to help. If all diseases are cured, there’ll be no Against Malaria Foundation to donate to. This is a great outcome, of course, but there’ll have been so much good we could’ve done before that that’s now impossible to capitalise on. So much pain and suffering we could’ve prevented, but didn’t, because we always put it off. Maybe next year we’ll donate to the Humane League, or take the Giving What We Can Pledge. Always soon, never now. Until the window for having a truly remarkable impact on the world has shut, and we just have to accept that some didn’t make it to the finish line because we spent our time procrastinating.

I worry we could find ourselves looking around as Schindler did, thinking of all the individuals we neglected to help. The people and animals that died, or endured immense pain, because we failed to step up to the plate when they needed us. Only seeing the good we didn’t do, and all the ways we fell short. I imagine it’d be quite heartbreaking - unless, of course, we instead seize the opportunity that’s presented itself.