Global priorities What are the most pressing problems to work on?

Perhaps the most important decision you face

Now that we have a sense of what ‘making a difference’ means, we can ask how you can make a difference with your career most effectively.

We think the most important single factor determining the expected impact of your work is probably the issue you choose to focus on.

For example, you might choose to focus on climate change, education, technological development, or something else. We think it’s of paramount importance to choose carefully.

Why?

Although it’s very challenging to compare different global issues, roughly we think say that the issues where your work will make the biggest difference are those that have the best overall combination of being comparatively

I. Neglected,

ii. Important, and

iii. Tractable.

Why work on issues that are comparatively neglected? The basic reason is that, at least among issues that are roughly similar in importance and tractability, it’s usually harder to have a big impact working on more established or popular issues, because there are probably already people working on the most promising interventions. For this reason, if you’re the 100th person working on a problem your contribution is likely to make a much larger difference than if you’re the 10,000th.

How much larger? In our view, returns to more work diminish relatively quickly, and most likely ‘logarithmically’ — meaning that it matters a lot how neglected an area is.

From what we’ve seen, some global issues appear to be thousands of times more neglected than others of similar importance — i.e. they receive only a tiny fraction of the resources. This implies that if all else is held constant, work in some areas is thousands of times more effective than work in others.

Of course, all else isn’t always equal — sometimes issues are neglected because they’re not important or not tractable. But in fact we think there are a number of problems that are highly neglected despite being very important and reasonably tractable. We argue for this in our profiles of individual global problems.

If this is roughly right, then working on some issues is much higher impact than working on others — making choosing the right issue to focus on one of the most important decisions you face.

Putting a number on the scale of these differences is very challenging, but our best estimate is that an additional person working on one of the most pressing issues will (in expectation) have over 100 times as much impact vs. an additional person working on a typical issue.

Just to be clear — in an ideal world there would be far more people working on every important social issue. However, as individuals, each of us only has one career, and we’ll all have far more impact if we focus on the issues that are the most pressing for us to work on right now.

Orienting your career around a new problem area is a big decision, and you don’t need to do it right away, especially if you’re early in your career when it’s important to focus on exploring and building skills. Generally, it’s worth doing some serious analysis before you make a big commitment to a particular path. In fact, if we were to draw only one lesson from all our research on high-impact careers, it’s that what issue you should work on in your career deserves a lot of thought.

So, given the importance of the question, what are the most important, neglected, and tractable issues? To answer this, we primarily aim to synthesise research by the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford, the Future of Humanity Institute, and The Open Philanthropy Project, where we have a number of advisers.

Although we present our view of the world’s most pressing problems below, we know some readers won’t share the assumptions that went into the analysis (or might think we’re making some other kind of mistake). Thus we also encourage you to compare issues you might work on according to your own estimates — using our framework as a guide insofar as you find it useful.

Our current view of the world’s most pressing problems

Enormous complexity as well as evolving circumstances mean any prioritization of global issues will be highly uncertain and subject to change. Nonetheless, our work over the years has led us to think that two broad categories of global issues are particularly pressing: successfully navigating emerging technologies, and research and capacity-building for future work.

We discuss which specific issues within these categories we prioritize most highly below.

Navigating emerging technologies

In the 1950s, the large-scale production of nuclear weapons meant that, for the first time, a few world leaders gained the ability to kill hundreds of millions of people — and possibly many more if they triggered a nuclear winter, which would make it very difficult to grow crops for several years. Since then, the possibility of runaway climate change has joined the list of catastrophic risks facing humanity.

During the next century we may develop new transformative technologies, such as advanced artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, which could bring about a radically better future — but which may also pose grave risks.

We’ve become increasingly convinced that one of the most crucial issues facing the present generation is how to wisely navigate the development of new technologies in order to increase the chance of a positive future for everyone, and to help reduce the risk of global catastrophes — events that, if they happened, could lead to billions of deaths and may even threaten to permanently end human civilisation — one form of ‘existential risk’.

We think that right now, trying to reduce these risks is one of the most important things we can do.

Interview: Helen Toner Helen previously worked as a senior research analyst at the Open Philanthropy Project, and lived in Beijing for nine months, studying the Chinese AI ecosystem as a research affiliate for the University of Oxford’s Center for the Governance of AI. Recently, she became the Director of Strategy at Georgetown University’s new Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), which aims to improve the understanding among policy makers of emerging technologies and their security implications.

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This is because we think the rise of powerful new technologies means that the probability of this kind of catastrophe occurring in our lifetimes is too big to ignore, and that a catastrophe like this would clearly be among the worst things that could possibly happen. This is especially true if one takes the longtermist perspective we covered above, because extinction would also mean the loss of the potential welfare of all future generations.

Moreover, some of these risks are highly neglected. For instance, less than $50 million per year is devoted to the field of AI safety or work specifically targeting global catastrophic biorisks. By comparison, billions or trillions of dollars go into more familiar priorities, such as international development, preventing terrorism, poverty relief in rich countries, education, and technological development. This makes the former fields perhaps 1,000 times more neglected.

This neglect suggests that a comparatively small number of additional people working on these risks could significantly reduce them. We suggest specific ways to help in the next section.

Research and capacity building

This said, we remain uncertain about this picture. Many of the ‘crucial considerations’ that led us to these priorities were only recently identified and written about. What’s more, there are significant arguments against the idea that reducing existential risk is the top priority from a longtermist perspective (see here and here). It also seems likely that we will learn of other ways to increase the probability of a positive long-term future and reduce the chance of widespread future suffering, some of which may seem more promising to address than the existential risks we currently focus on.

For these reasons, we also work to support those creating the new academic field of global priorities research, which draws on economics, philosophy and other disciplines to work out what’s most crucial for the long-term future.

Interview: Hilary Greaves Hilary is Director of the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford. She is helping to create a new academic field of global priorities research. Her own research areas include population ethics and moral uncertainty.

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In addition, we encourage people to work on ‘capacity-building’ measures that will help humanity manage future challenges. For instance, these measures could involve improving institutional decision making and building the ‘effective altruism’ community — a community of people aiming to work on the problems that turn out to be most pressing in the future, whatever those might be (this flexibility is why we helped to set up the effective altruism community in the first place).

Our overall prioritized list of issues

Given how little research there has been in prioritizing global issues, we would not be surprised if our views changed significantly in the future.

That said, our rough guess at which specific areas are most pressing for more people to work on right now is as follows.

Click the links to see our full discussion of each area and why we prioritize it as highly as we do.

Highest-priority areas:

Second-highest-priority areas:

Together, these categories make up what we call our “priority problem areas” or “priority problems.”

Other potentially promising issues to work on

The following are some more issues that seem like they might be very promising to work on, but we haven’t investigated very much, so we aren’t as confident as we are about the areas listed above. Focusing on one of these might be especially promising if you already have relevant experience or you are particularly motivated by the issue.

What about if you want to focus more on concrete, measurable impact in the near term? In that case we think some of the best issues to work on are improving people’s health in poorer countries and reducing suffering from factory farming, as these issues affect many lives and receive less attention than they deserve.

For even more options, see our additional lists of issues.

We also take seriously the chance of discovering ‘Cause X’ — an issue we don’t yet prioritise (or even know about) but which will turn out to be as or even more pressing than the issues we discuss here.