Good policy ideas that won’t happen (yet)

Abstract

Over the last year the Centre for Effective Altruism has had over a dozen meetings with UK policymakers and tested the waters on a range of policies we thought might have significant positive benefits for the world. In most cases we quickly found that they could not currently attract political support, for various reasons. Here we discuss two more we investigated in greater detail. These were both aimed at improving the depth of knowledge of policymakers about risks from new and upcoming technologies. These turned out to be premature, as they were policies to deal with issues about which there is no academic consensus on the nature of the problem, let alone the appropriate response. More groundwork needs to be done before there will be majority support for significant policy changes in these areas. Nonetheless we had successes in raising the profile of unprecedented technological risks in Government via a report we wrote which was widely circulated through several departments and read by senior civil servants, advisors, and politicians. We were also invited to contribute a chapter on existential risk to the Government Chief Scientist’s Annual Report.