Survival

We believe that unaligned AI poses the greatest risk to our world that has ever existed.

We have preciously little time to steer the development of artificial intelligence so it doesn’t unintentionally or intentionally result in the extinction or subjugation of all life as we know it.

Upgradable has been in development through various iterations since at least 2007, always with the end goal of creating flourishing change agents capable of understanding and effectively tackling the world’s most pressing challenges.

Ensuring humanity’s survival is by far our most pressing challenge. Nearly everything else we value relies on it. 

Our team saw the risks from transformative technologies early. Our founder built his first proto-existential risk safety organization in high school and advocated for what became known as effective altruism (“EA”) years before it coalesced as a movement in 2011. In 2015, Upgradable co-founded and led Effective Altruism Global, which had Stuart Russell, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Elon Musk warning us of the dangers to come. Our team also co-founded Effective Altruism Ventures and Singapore Futurists, and led Bay Area Futurists and advised 80,000 Hours, all of which worked to minimize existential risks. 

Today millions of people seem to be taking the risk of near-term human extinction seriously. If you’re reading this and feeling the fear, know you are not alone.  

Upgradable is here to help you help. It’s overwhelming to even seriously contemplate the risks, let alone do something about them. It takes clear thinking, deep focus, emotional fortitude, ample preparedness, and the will to act to actually make a difference. And it helps enormously having a strategic plan outlining what you personally could do. That’s what UP is all about.

So if you are or would like to work on mitigating existential risks from AI, synthetic biology, nuclear weapons or other new technologies, please consider letting us serve you. It would be an honor.

You’re all heroes, in our view. The world needs as many of you fighting for our survival as possible. If we make it through the next few harrowing years, we may just be able to create a world where everyone flourishes. That’s a future worth fighting for.