Effective Altruism Funds
Long-Term Future Fund
The Long-Term Future Fund aims to positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilisation by making grants that address global catastrophic risks, especially potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence and pandemics.
What problem is the Long-Term Future Fund working on?
The Long-Term Future Fund aims to positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilisation by making grants that address global catastrophic risks, especially potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence and pandemics. In addition, the Fund seeks to promote, implement, and advocate for longtermist ideas, and to otherwise increase the likelihood that future generations will flourish.
What projects does the Long-Term Future Fund support?
The Fund has a broad remit to make grants that promote, implement, and advocate for longtermist ideas. It supports:
- Projects that directly contribute to reducing existential risks through technical research, policy analysis, advocacy, and/or demonstration projects.
- Training for researchers or practitioners who work to mitigate existential risks.
- Work that helps with relevant recruitment efforts or infrastructure for people working on longtermist projects.
- Projects that promote long-term thinking.
Recent grant recipients include:
- EA Switzerland/PIBBSS Fellowship — a 10–12 week summer research fellowship programme to facilitate interdisciplinary AI alignment research.
- Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative — 12-month salary for a software developer to create a library for Seldonian (safe and fair) machine learning algorithms.
- Noemi Dreksler — two-year funding to run public and expert surveys on AI governance and forecasting.
- The Center for Election Science — general support for campaigns to adopt approval voting at local levels in the US.
For more information about how donations are allocated, see the list of past recipients and frequently asked questions on the EA Funds website.
Why do we include the Long-Term Future Fund on our list of recommended programs?
We investigated the Long-Term Future Fund as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations and determined that it is a great choice for donors wishing to maximise the impact of their “dollar” when supporting global catastrophic risk reduction. See the full report here.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.