The zero-sum AI race stifles global cooperation and heightens risks.

Effective altruism combats biases by focusing on catastrophic risks.

Being overconfident in AI risk assessments isn't worse than ignoring risks altogether.

In the race for global AI dominance—economically, militarily, and so forth—some people view any attempts to slow down AI development as problematic, whether for ethical reasons, like ensuring that large language models aren’t racist, or for existential ones, like the danger of superintelligence. The premise is a winner-takes-all mentality that assumes whichever nation gets to superintelligent AI first gains global dominance.

Viewed from this mentality, one can make sense of these surreal X posts. If you see the issue as one big race between China and the United States that will determine the fate of this planet, you can make some sense of these tweets. But that’s quite a radical position to hold. Then again, politicians and the general public are prone to think of world problems as zero-sum games, where there can only be one winner and everyone else is a loser.

The Winner-Take-All Mindset

X has seen thousands of tweets over the last week about effective altruism, much of it hostile and focused on its alleged “AI doomerism.” Many effective altruists are worried that AI might have catastrophic effects, all the way from human extinction to milder ones like enabling terrorists to create bioweapons. That is true. But I’ve been puzzled by the repeated assertions by prominent people that effective altruists are an “AI doomer cult.”

I agree with many critics that it’s extremely speculative to try to evaluate the risks of AI. And different people in the AI risk debates, whether or not they are........

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