“The AI people have been right a lot” by Dylan Matthews

“The AI people have been right a lot” by Dylan Matthews

April 20, 2026 · 11 min

About this episode

Dylan Matthews reflects on the prominence of AI risk discussions at the 2015 Effective Altruism Global event.

This post was crossposted from Dylan Matthew's blog by the EA Forum team. The author may not see or reply to comments. Subtitle: Try to keep an open mind as the world gets increasingly wild. The crowd at EAG 2015 (Center for Effective Altruism) In 2015, I went to my first EA (Effective Altruism) Global. It was then on-the-record for journalists, which is a rule that got changed for all subsequent events due to my actions. My exposure to EA at that time was mostly through people who took high-paying careers in order to “earn to give” to global health charities, which I had written about in the Washington Post. I also knew the movement cared a lot about animal welfare. I was aware that there were people worried about catastrophic risks, and specifically about AI; this had come up in a profile I wrote of Open Philanthropy (my now-employer, albeit under a new name these days). But I still broadly thought of EA as the bednets and cage-free commitments people. I was really taken aback by how dominant discussions of AI risk were at the event. The marquee panel featured Superintelligence author Nick Bostrom, future If Anyone Builds It [...] --- Outline: (03:31) What should I learn from…

People in this episode

Host: EA Forum Team

Guest: Dylan Matthews

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Center for Effective Altruism, Open Philanthropy

Books & works: Superintelligence

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