You have $8 billion. You want to do as much good as possible. What do you do?

I sat in a San Francisco conference room a few months ago as 14 staffers at the charity recommendation group GiveWell discussed the ways in which artificial intelligence — extreme, world-transforming, human-level artificial intelligence — could destroy the world. Not just as idle chatter, mind you. They were trying to work out whether it's worthwhile to direct money — lots of it — toward preventing AI from destroying us all, money that otherwise could go to fighting poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

"Say you tell the AI to make as many paper clips as it can possibly make," Howie Lempel, a program officer at GiveWell, proposed, borrowing a thought experiment from Oxford professor Nick Bostrom.

The super AI isn't necessarily going to be moral. Even with positive goals, it could

backfire. It could see the whole world as a resource to be exploited for making paper clips, for example.

"We want to burn down our foundation before we die, and ideally well before we die"

"Just because it's very intelligent doesn't mean it has reasonable values," Lempel said. "Maybe it starts turning puppies into paper clips."

"Maybe it would turn the whole universe into paper clips," cofounder and co-executive director Holden Karnofsky added.

Joining the GiveWell staff in the meeting was Cari Tuna, the president of Good Ventures, a foundation she and her husband, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, founded with their roughly $8.3 billion fortune. The couple plans on giving most of that sum away.

"We want to burn down our foundation before we die, and ideally well before we die," says Tuna. So she and Moskovitz joined forces with GiveWell to form the Open Philanthropy Project, whose mission is to figure out how, exactly, they should spend their billions to do as much good as possible.

That may mean giving cash to poor people in Uganda, or distributing anti-malarial bed nets, but it also might mean funding research into how to prevent AI from killing us all. Or it might mean funding the fight to end mass incarceration in the US. Or it might mean funding biological research.

Open Phil (as the staff calls it, eschewing the OPP acronym) doesn't know which of these is the best bet, but it's determined to find out. Its six full-time staffers have taken on the unenviable task of ranking every plausible way to make the world a much better place, and figuring out how much money to commit to the winners. It's the biggest test yet of GiveWell's heavily empirical approach to picking charities. If it works, it could change the face of philanthropy.

Better charity through research

The team at Open Phil are effective altruists, members of a growing movement that commits itself to using empirical methods to work out how to do the most good it possibly can.

Effective altruism holds that giving abroad is probably a better idea than giving in the US. It suggests that giving to disaster relief is worse than giving elsewhere. It argues that supporting music and the arts is a waste. "In a world that had overcome extreme poverty and other major problems that face us now, promoting the arts would be a worthy goal," philosopher Peter Singer, a proponent of effective altruism, writes in his new book, The Most Good You Can Do. In the meantime, opera houses will have to wait.

Effective altruism also implies it's quite possible that even the best here-and-now causes — giving cash to the global poor, distributing anti-malarial bed nets in sub-Saharan Africa — are less cost-effective than trying to reduce the risk of the world as we know it ending. Hence, the chatter about AI. If it causes human extinction, then billions, trillions, even quadrillions of future humans who otherwise would have lived happy lives won't. That dwarfs the impact of global poverty or disease at the present moment. As Bostrom writes in a 2013 paper, "If benefiting humanity by increasing existential safety achieves expected good on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than that of alternative contributions, we would do well to focus on this most efficient philanthropy."

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What's radical about GiveWell and Open Phil is their commitment to do substantial empirical research before deciding on causes. Many other foundations pick issues based simply on the personal whims of the funder. If that whim is to fund medical science (as in the case of Howard Hughes), the world gains. But if it's to fund a fancy art museum (as J. Paul Getty did with his fortune), then money that could have saved lives was, in the effective altruist view, frittered away.

"The vast majority of donors aren't interested in doing any research before making a charitable contribution," Paul Brest, former president of the Hewlett Foundation, wrote in an article praising effective altruism. "Many seem satisfied with the warm glow that comes from giving; indeed, too much analysis may even reduce the charitable impulse." By contrast, effective altruists are obsessed with doing research into cause effectiveness. Open Phil has a literal spreadsheet ranking a number of different causes it might invest in.

That has earned effective altruism criticism from more traditional corners of philanthropy. Charity Navigator, which tries to ensure that charities' money goes where they say it's going, has been particularly opposed. Its CEO, Ken Berger, and consultant Robert Penna penned a venomous takedown in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, in which they replaced every mention of "effective altruism" with "defective altruism."

"This approach amounts to little more than charitable imperialism, whereby ‘my cause' is just, and yours is — to one degree or another — a waste of precious resources," they write. In the comments of the piece, Penna clarified: "We do not believe that it is the role of anyone to say to another that his or her cause is not 'worthy.'"

To effective altruists, this attitude reeks of moral nihilism. In response to Berger and Penna, Will MacAskill, who founded the effective altruist group 80,000 Hours and co-founded Giving What We Can, proposed a thought experiment. Say you're standing before two burning buildings, one of which has a family of five trapped inside and the other of which is storing a $20,000 painting for a nearby museum. You only have time to save the family or the painting. What do you do? Save the family, right? Now, how is that different from choosing whether to save lives by giving to the Against Malaria Foundation or to make exhibits a little nicer by giving to the Metropolitan Museum of Art? It's not, MacAskill claims, and that's lethal to the argument for philanthropic pluralism: "[Berger and Penna] have to reject the idea that the family of five's interest in continuing to live is weightier and more morally important than the museumgoers' interest in viewing an additional painting."

That's the other thing about effective altruists: they're utilitarians. Or, if not utilitarians obsessed with maximizing happiness, they're consequentialists concerned with maximizing the good in whatever form it takes. "We want to give people more power to live the life they want to live. It's a consequentialist moral framework," GiveWell's Karnofsky says. "Justice as an end in itself, liberty as an end in itself — those aren't things we're interested in."

"The vast majority of donors aren't interested in doing any research before making a contribution"

That lends itself to a particular political bent, which is left of center but technocratic, friendly to markets (when they can be shown to work), and, above all, cosmopolitan. Effective altruists, and GiveWell in particular, go to great lengths to emphasize that doing good abroad is just as valuable as doing it in America, and probably cheaper, as well. They're sympathetic to the welfare state but far more jazzed about open borders.

Effective altruists tend to share a hyper-analytical personality type. Before visiting the GiveWell offices, I went to a Super Bowl party at Karnofsky's house. We went around the room saying which team we were rooting for — the New England Patriots or the Seattle Seahawks — and why. Karnofsky said he was rooting for the Pats in light of then-recent allegations that they had purposely deflated their balls to win the AFC championship. Many detractors wanted them to lose as punishment for this offense, and Karnofsky thought it important to disabuse the public of the notion that the world can exact cosmic justice like that: "Trial by combat doesn't work." Tim Telleen-Lawton, a GiveWell analyst and roommate of Karnofsky's, said he was rooting for a tie, as it was the most improbable outcome and thus the most exciting. My explanation — my dad's a Seahawks fan, so I'm a Seahawks fan — felt a little under-reasoned by comparison.

My reasoning failures aside, the effective altruists' tendency to rationally analyze everything is endearing, and I should disclose that I've been won over. I'm a cosmopolitan utilitarian, too. I've given to GiveWell's recommended charities for years (GiveDirectly is my current favorite). I'm friends with many of the staffers outside work. I talked to Karnofsky and Berger about policy issues in the early going of Open Phil, even musing about what we should name the idiosyncratic set of positions we happen to share ("newtilitarianism" was rejected as an offense against the English language). And I was and remain deeply excited by the prospect of a dedicated team sharing my values doing empirical research to rank policy issues in order of importance — which is exactly what Open Phil is up to.

How Open Phil thinks about causes

Open Phil may not care about justice as an end in itself, but it's certainly interested in it as a means. Criminal justice reform is one of its top priorities at the moment, not because of the concerns over due process and constitutional liberties that motivate many groups working on the topic, but due to the Open Phil team's hard-to-dispute observation that prison is really, really awful.

Most Americans live lives far better than those of people in developing countries, but the same can't necessarily be said for prisoners. That makes interventions involving American incarceration look similarly promising to ones benefiting the global poor. In global health, it's common to talk in terms of "disability-adjusted life years" (DALYs), which measure a disease's burden by considering both how many years of life it denies victims and how much worse it makes their lives before they perish. A disease that cuts 10 years off your lifespan and causes 10 years of partial paralysis before that has a higher DALY toll than one that just cuts off 10 years, for instance.