Giving Compass' Take:

• Felix Salmon argues that the high-risk global-scale long-term philanthropy efforts favored by tech giants unethically ignore the suffering of humans today. 

• Scalability and upstream solutions are core tenants of impact-driven philanthropy, to what extent is that the ethical approach? What are the consequences of ignoring problems that will likely develop as technologies like AI continue to grow and change? 

• Learn about the importance of regulating AI. 

Big software founder-CEOs, it turns out, aren’t just different from you and me; they’re different even from other billionaires.

That’s because, from the Olympian heights of Big Tech, humanity has a tendency to look rather small. We see Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page as the inventors of Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google—tools that touch us every day. But how do they see us? The chilling truth is that if you want to create services at scale—if you want to build machines that transform the lived experience of billions of individuals—then you need to be able to aggregate and simplify humans. You need to reduce us to some kind of algorithm that can anticipate and monetize our collective behavior.

Mark Zuckerberg has even made that thinking explicit. In his letter to his newborn daughter Max, Zuckerberg wrote that “all lives have equal value, and that includes the many more people who will live in future generations than live today. Our society has an obligation to invest now to improve the lives of all those coming into this world, not just those already here.”

If you take his statement seriously, then it effectively means that our preoccupation with the needs of the present is deeply parochial and probably unethical. To single out one particular group for help and aid, while ignoring others, is often condemned as racist. In the eyes of Bezos and Zuckerberg, it’s equally bad to concentrate on the suffering of the living, if doing so means ignoring the needs of the untold billions of people who are not yet born.

Silicon Valley fancies itself the home of bold moonshots, a place where billions of dollars are regularly invested into high-risk projects with a high probability of failure. The tech moguls have all won that lottery once. Now they’re playing it again, for the sake of trillions of hypothetical future humans—who are much easier to model than the real humans next door.

Read the full article about ethics of large-scale philanthropy by Felix Salmon at WIRED.