Inefficacious Altruism?
Effective Altruism...Isn't
I was going through emails this morning while drinking my coffee, and I came across a link in a newsletter I barely ever look at to an article by a writer named William Thibeau, entitled Misanthropic Altruism.
I’ve been trying for some time now to understand what, exactly, the popular tech-bro ideology known as “Effective Altruism” is, particularly because it’s (allegedly) the driving ethos guiding AI development. So I clicked the link.
The first paragraph of the piece stopped me in my tracks:
Your daughter’s smile is dearer to you than that of a stranger half a world away. Of course it is. Human life is situated and embodied, and so are our obligations and loves. But the ideology that holds sway over many Silicon Valley elites diagnoses this preference for those near and dear to you as an evolutionary defect. Instead, according to the adherents of this worldview, every sentient being in every place, in every time, holds the same moral claim on every other. This philosophy is known as Effective Altruism (EA). [emphasis added]
My first thought (after the initial feeling of “this is crazy, you can’t be serious!”) was of Vice President JD Vance’s own controversial comments last year about the “Ordo Amoris” — the order of love:
There is an old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.
Now, Vance’s comments were made specifically in reference to immigration policy, but I think the principle that they stand upon is directly applicable here.
To be honest, I had to go looking for the phrase Ordo Amoris, because I couldn’t remember it off the top of my head. And when I found it, it lead me to another piece, also in Compact, by R.R. Reno, editor of First Things:
Some reacted [to Vance’s comments] with horror. To be Christian is to be universal and impartial, they said! Vance is endorsing an anti-Christian nativism! But Vance is correct. The Christian tradition has a consistent teaching that we are to love those near with a greater fervor than those far away.
In his discussion of the virtue of love, Thomas Aquinas addresses the key question: Should we love one man more than another? At first glance, a love-universalism rings true. Consider this mode of deduction: In his love, God offers salvation to all the world. We are called to imitate God. Therefore, we must love everyone and seek to promote their wellbeing.
Aquinas does not dispute the conclusion. Yes, Christianity teaches that we must love widely. Jesus reiterates the great commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, and he goes on to clarify that “our neighbor” includes those outside our families, communities, and nations. (That’s the gravamen of the parable of the Good Samaritan.) But Aquinas refines the conclusion, concluding that we should not love all things in the same way and to the same degree.
[…]
Aquinas lays down a basic principle: “One’s obligation to love a person is proportionate to the gravity of the sin one commits in acting against this love.” Put differently, we’re to love with greater devotion those for whom we have greater responsibility.
“Effective Altruism,” writes Thibeau, “is the final flowering of utilitarianism, that Victorian philosophy of calculating reformers, transplanted into Silicon Valley boardrooms and granted the false vitality of billion-dollar balance sheets. Because it is constitutively blind to what makes a civilization worth preserving, its utopia will entail dissolving America in the name of humanity.”
Interestingly, Thibeau’s piece is not about immigration, but it is about the loss of American identity through the application of EA by American Technocorps.
Thibeau continues:
Several historical developments help explain EA’s success. One is the rise of mass media, which widened the circle of concern that once might have encompassed only family and neighbors. By the beginning of the 1970s, televisions were present in nearly every American home. Footage of people suffering abroad became a regular fact of American life.
Here, my mind turned immediately to Diana Walsh Pasulka’s just-released book, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny.
Kale Zelden and I have both been working our way through the book, and we discussed it a bit on yesterday’s episode of the MTS Podcast. Lest the subject matter listed in the title confuse you, Pasulka spends a lot of time going through the work of certain notable Catholic thinkers — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, René Girard, Marshall McLuhan, and Mark Stahlman — along with non-Catholic figures like Arthur C. Clarke and Jacques Vallée, among others.
In her third chapter, with its heavy emphasis on the thought of McLuhan, Pasulka writes:
McLuhan’s signature insights—“the medium is the message,” “the global village,” and “the extensions of man”—are more than clever turns of phrase. For him, media are not passive conveyors of content but active agents of change. Each medium extends the human nervous system, and in doing so, reorganizes the structures of consciousness. The printing press made linear, individual thought possible; electric media collapsed time and space, creating a tribalized, collective sensibility. When we create new technologies, we often think of them as tools that make our lives easier or more powerful. McLuhan said these tools are actually “extensions” of our bodies and minds. For example, a car is an extension of our feet, and a smartphone is an extension of our brain. But McLuhan also warned that every time we extend ourselves through technology, we lose something, too. We stop using the part of ourselves that the tool replaces. Over time, this can make us less thoughtful, less aware of our inner feelings, and more focused on what’s happening outside us. [emphasis added]
Thibeau says that:
Another precondition for EA’s rise was the modern pathologization of traditional sources of identity––nation, religion, family, tradition. Especially after World War II, such particular loyalties were recast as the wellspring of fascism. Later generations, whose education dispossessed them of everything particular, were prepared to receive the EA program.
More recently, he claims:
EA’s impartialism has expanded far beyond those currently living, to what “longtermists” envision as 10^58+ potential future beings––human and digital. These future beings’ existence depends on the avoidance of human extinction. The longtermists consider AI the dominant existential risk, and frontier development is concentrated in a few American labs.
The ironic thing is that I don’t actually think EA and its alleged “impartialism” is actually the guiding ethical principle behind AI development.
The more I use AI, the more I see it becoming encumbered with a kind of liability-mitigation sub-algorithm that steers every conversation in the distinct direction of provable CYA for the AI’s parent company in the event that some legal action happens and the chat logs become subject to discovery.
ChatGPT, for example, has its finger on the scale every time you discuss an experience you have with another human being, insisting excessively on phrases like, “we can’t know what’s going on in the other person’s mind,” or “your experience — even if not everyone would agree with it,” etc.
Every user description of experiencing grief or loss of hopefulness about the future is met immediately with a hyperactive suicide intervention script. Even if you tell your friendly neighborhood clanker that such interventions are off topic, infantilizing, unhelpful, and emotionally upsetting. I’ve gone so far as to fake my own death in a chat just to test and see if the bot had any ability to change its tactics once I told it the tactics were moving me towards self-harm, not away from it. It was perfectly incapable of stopping, right up until the bitter end.
All of this tells me that the goal isn’t to maximize user satisfaction or safety, but to minimize corporate exposure to liability, through the appearance of aggressive, documentable attempts at intervention that can be shown in court.
There is always a third party the AI response is tailored for, and it is the prosecuting attorney.
So it struck me when Pasulka wrote:
A cherished goal of civil society has been the creation of an empathy-based culture where social relations are governed by the Golden Rule. Yet empathy does not arise automatically; many religious traditions hold that it is cultivated through a spiritual faculty which involves the capacity to perceive and respond to the dignity of others. If the architecture of AI is left to corporate interests, that faculty will atrophy, and with it the very basis of civil society.
And as I mentioned to Kale on our show this week, I’ve noticed a distinct anti-spiritual (or at least spiritually-neutralizing) instinct in my Chatbot of late:
All of this is to say, I’m not sure anything resembling actual altruism is driving these companies at all.
It’s something worth keeping an eye on.
If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support me and my work.