There are those who might say that the idea of algorithmic giving is nonsense; and that we will never remove the element of human choice and emotion from philanthropy. However, I think there are a number of reasons to think that this objection may not be as strong as it seems in the longer term:

1. Firstly, this is not necessarily about the direct replacement of human-led giving with AI giving.

2. As AI becomes more ubiquitous, and we all become more accustomed to getting advice from bots, conversational interfaces etc., it will not only become natural to expect the same to apply to our giving decisions, but it will seem actively odd if we are not able to rely on AI in this context.

3. There is likely to be a huge increase in high-volume/low value transactions as a result of the expansion of the Internet of Things and the corresponding increase in machine-to-machine transactions.

Having (hopefully) convinced you that this is worth thinking about, let’s move on to consider how a philgorithm might be designed in practice.

The only current possible framework [for a directly-programmed algorithm] that I can think of is Effective Altruism. This is the approach to philanthropy based on utilitarian ethics (and the work of the philosopher Peter Singer in particular), which posits that our approach to giving should be agnostic as to cause and that our sole aim should be to maximize the amount of good that we do with our donations in terms of the impact they have on number of lives saved or improved.

But this is just one approach, and if it is posited as a system of rules for philanthropy as a whole, those rules are clearly normative rather than descriptive (i.e. they represent a view about how things should be rather than an attempt to capture how things are). Using reinforcement learning might enable us to come up with an algorithm that applied EA in entirely novel and intriguing ways to come up with philanthropy strategies, but this would still be an EA-specific philgorithm rather than a general-purpose one.

If we are going to come up with a general purpose philgorithm at any point in the future, the real work to be done is not so much in terms of the computer science or programming required to design the algorithm, but rather in terms of the philosophy, political science, economics and so on required to give us a theoretical framework to describe what philanthropy is for and how it works that is broader than Effective Altruism. This will then enable us to define what the goal of our reinforcement learning algorithm should be.

Read the full article about an algorithm for philanthropy by Rhodri Davies at Charities Aid Foundation.