Why we fund both progress and safety | Open Philanthropy

Advances in frontier science and technology have historically been the key drivers of massive improvements in human well-being. Safety is sometimes portrayed as just an impediment to that progress, but we believe safety is both itself a key kind of progress and a precondition for ongoing innovation, especially when it comes to unprecedented breakthroughs like artificial general intelligence (AGI). While there are tensions to navigate, safety and progress at their best are mutually reinforcing, and both are essential to realizing the profound potential benefits of transformative new technologies. Open Philanthropy’s mission is to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us. We do that by working across worldviews, which each have an associated structural thesis for why it might represent an outstanding philanthropic opportunity. For instance: This post focuses on how we think about the relationship between #1 and #2, especially when it comes to AI, which looks both

Advances in frontier science and technology have historically been the key drivers of massive improvements in human well-being. Safety is sometimes portrayed as just an impediment to that progress, but we believe safety is both itself a key kind of progress and a precondition for ongoing innovation, especially when it comes to unprecedented breakthroughs like artificial general intelligence (AGI). While there are tensions to navigate, safety and progress at their best are mutually reinforcing, and both are essential to realizing the profound potential benefits of transformative new technologie