This panel brings together three leading researchers to discuss their work on welfare and moral patienthood in non-human minds. The panel focuses on two especially challenging cases: invertebrates and digital minds. Jeff Sebo (NYU) begins with a discussion of ethical and methodological considerations related to extending moral considerability to invertebrates and AI systems; Daniela Waldhorn (Rethink Priorities) discusses the current state of evidence regarding consciousness and sentience in...

Taking a giving pledge could be a high impact way to help others—but there are some important considerations to think through before making a commitment. This session is a balanced exploration about why and why not to pledge, and the relevant factors that might influence your decision. In this talk you'll hear from people who haven't pledged, as well as those who have and learn about their thinking on the topic. We cover insights from Giving What We Can's user research about what motivates...

Associate Director of External Relations Carlita Bevege gives us an inside look at Evidence Action's flagship programs, Deworm the World and Dispensers for Safe Water, and take us through the Accelerator, their engine for new program development. She provides insight into how Evidence Action evaluates the research behind promising new interventions and brings those with the most potential for impact to scale, reaching hundreds of millions of people with proven low-cost health solutions....

Professional groups and EA navigating uncertainty together with open-mindedness and humility Ellie Christian and Clare Harris Ellie Christian is a Newcastle-based medical doctor. She is a masters of public health student at the University of Sydney. She is the Australia coordinator for High Impact Medicine. Clare Harris is a junior medical doctor working as a researcher for Spencer Greenberg at SparkWave.tech. She's head of monitoring and evaluation at High Impact Medicine. She has...

A fire side chat with Marcus Daniell (professional tennis player and Olympic medallist) about founding High Impact Athletes, an organisation helping athletes give effectively. Marcus is the Founder and Executive Director of High Impact Athletes and has pledged 10% of his earnings to effective organisations for life. Marcus is a two-time Olympian and bronze medallist, a Wimbledon and Australian Open Quarterfinalist, and 5-time ATP Titleholder. Grace is the Head of Marketing at Giving What We...

Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) is a nonprofit organization with two primary objectives: 1) to identify, pilot, and prepare resilient food alternatives, in the event that a catastrophe damages conventional food supplies 2) to help governments and communities implement these solutions during a global food shock As devastating as catastrophes are, the threat of a global catastrophe is not just the initial destruction, but also the impact it could have on food supplies and...

Hear why it’s a mistake not to prioritise giving as part of effective altruism and how effective giving is the key to unlocking the impact that effective altruism seeks to create. You’ll also learn practical ways we can all help increase funding to effective charities and projects. Luke Freeman manages Giving What We Can, a global community dedicated to giving effectively and significantly that’s best known for their over 8,000 members who have pledged to give 10% of their lifetime income to...

The danger of nuclear weapons is growing: what can we do to address this existential risk? Marianne Hanson Building on her keynote remarks, Marianne Hanson, co-founder of the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), elaborates on the escalating dangers posed by nuclear weapons and outlines steps that can be taken to mitigate these risks. Marianne Hanson is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, Australia, where...

Climate 200 helps communities strike at the root of the problem when it comes to action on climate change, and opportunities to get involved in the community independents movement. Alexandria Rantino is the Chief Operating Officer at Climate 200, a crowdfunded organisation that supports the election campaigns of independents committed to science based climate action, restoring integrity to politics, and advancing the respect and safety of women. Alex has pursued climate action throughout her...

Chetan Kharbanda - Starting a Charity Entrepreneurship charity on-ground. This talk is aimed at sharing key learnings from the journey of going from incubation to launching real-world operations. It outlines how the CE program equipped the charity with tools and funding and the execution required to navigate complex systems and lots of uncertainty. Making good data-driven decisions and flexibility are imperative to starting an impactful charity. Kate Tapping - From a 'shower idea' to a...

Ryan is Co-Director of the ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program, a Board Member and Co-Founder of the London Initiative for Safe AI, and a Manifund Regrantor. Previously, he completed a PhD in Physics at the University of Queensland and ran UQ’s Effective Altruism student group for ~3 years. Ryan’s ethics are largely preference utilitarian and cosmopolitan; he is deeply concerned about near-term x-risk and safeguarding the long-term future. James Fodor is a PhD student in the Decision, Risk...

Hon Dr. Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury Assistant Minister for Employment in the Albanese ministry. Leigh holds a PhD from PhD in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School. Dr Bidda Jones AM leads the Australian Alliance for Animals' strategy for animal welfare and evidence-based research. A zoologist specialising in animal behaviour and welfare, Bidda previously worked for RSPCA Australia as their Chief Science and Strategy Officer,...

Jenna Ong is the co-creator of Insights for Impact, a Youtube channel which works on communicating research insights for positive impact in the form of documentary-style, entertaining and explanatory videos. She was also the co-founder of Effective Altruism Canberra. Wellbeing science has seen rapid development in the last few decades thanks to new data. Researchers in this space are primarily interested in how to reduce suffering and live a good life. Meanwhile the core aim of effective...

The richest countries in the world are about one hundred times wealthier per person than the poorest countries. How did such immense differences arise, and why do they continue to exist? This talk summarises various proposed solutions to this paradox of economic development, including theories emphasising culture, geography, dependency, and institutions. Drawing upon comparative historical analysis, formal models, and statistical evidence, the talk argues that the quality of political and...

Victoria Baranov is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne. In her research, Victoria couples RCTs and longitudinal data in her research that looks into how psychological factors may perpetuate poverty traps. Her team conducted an RCT in rural Pakistan, providing psychotherapy to depressed mothers in the treatment group, while simultaneously collecting bio-samples and baseline data. She compared life outcomes at 7 years postpartum, with significant positive...

Climate change is one of the biggest problems we have to face. This talk discusses some of the more effective and neglected methods of addressing climate change, and unpacks what Australia can do to make a difference in climate on a global scale. Jack Rafferty is the Manager of Climate Giving for Giving Green Australia. Prior to joining Giving Green, Jack was the Co-founder and Director of Lead Exposure Elimination Project, a policy focused international NGO that is working to end childhood...

Join the organizers for a brief welcome and a group photo of attendees, followed by a short talk from Ben West. Ben is the Interim Managing Director of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) and he is responsible for overseeing CEA’s work during the transition to new permanent leadership. He will speak on the current state of the EA movement and possible directions for its future. Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqwE9RyxxQs&t=4s

In this session, Ryan Ritterson will use examples of his and others’ work at Gryphon to tell stories about how to effectively influence public policy. Based on Gryphon’s data-driven approach, he’ll provide key lessons learned and takeaways for others interested in influencing policy. Along the way, he’ll also talk about two recent Gryphon efforts, including one focused on developing and securing pandemic-proof PPE, and the other on Gryphon’s recent AI safety contributions, which played a key...

This talk examines whether advanced AIs that perform well in training will be doing so in order to gain power later — a behavior Joe Carlsmith calls "scheming" (also often called "deceptive alignment"). This talk gives an overview of his recent report on the topic, available on arXiv here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08379. Joe Carlsmith is a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy, where he focuses on existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence. He also writes independently...

Should you be able to order smallpox DNA in the mail? Biosecurity professionals have argued for almost 20 years that synthesis companies should screen orders so that pathogen and toxin sequences are only sent to people with a real scientific use for them. Now, it seems like fears of AI-engineered pandemics may spur governments to make screening mandatory. Tessa will discuss why securing nucleic acid synthesis is a biosecurity priority, methods for identifying concerning synthesis orders, and...

Media coverage of catastrophic risk is going mainstream; our panel of media professionals discuss the ways it's going right vs going wrong, and what actions they are taking to focus the conversation on well-reasoned risk models and effective interventions. On the panel will be Kelsey Piper of Vox Future Perfect, Shakeel Hashim of the AI Safety Communications Centre, and Clara Collier of Asterisk Magazine. Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33XDXk6wBgg

Hayley Clatterbuck will summarize key findings from Rethink Priorities' ""Causes and uncertainty: Rethinking value in expectation"" (CURVE) project, which evaluated the cost-effectiveness of existential risk mitigation projects under both standard expected utility maximization and risk aversion. Persistence of effect and future growth trajectory are the strongest contributors to expected utility. Different risk models often deliver different recommendations about which existential risk...

The five years since Toby Ord wrote The Precipice have seen dramatic changes to the landscape of existential risk. Ord will explore the biggest changes to the biggest risks, showing how new developments have upended key assumptions and pushed some of these risks into new phases. And we’ll see how the world has woken up to the very idea of existential risk, with it becoming an explicit priority and talking point on the global stage. Toby Ord is a philosopher at Oxford University. His work...

If an AI system learned a deceptive strategy, could we detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques? That's the question that Evan and his coauthors at Anthropic sought to answer in their work on ""Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training"", which Evan will be discussing. Evan Hubinger leads the new Alignment Stress-Testing team at Anthropic, which is tasked with red-teaming Anthropic's internal alignment techniques and...