Ninety-nine percent of people believe they can't do great things, so they aim for mediocrity.
You should always aim high in your life irrespective of the other factors. If you aim high there are high chances that you might end up learning new things and lessons than aiming low in life.

High-risk, high-gain technological endeavor is becoming increasingly fashionable. Efforts such as the Ansari X Prize and the sequencing of the human genome may possibly lay claim to having kick-started a new culture of breathtaking ambition-and it is perhaps, therefore, no great surprise that the figures who shot to public prominence on the strength of those two projects, Peter Diamandis and Craig Venter, have now teamed up to tackle aging in the form of Human Longevity, Inc. But more recently the trend is burgeoning, albeit, for now, mainly restricted to California.

Arguably the most conspicuous leader of all in this regard is Elon Musk, who has succeeded in taking not one but two firms to success in ventures that no one in their right mind would have thought reasonable, namely Tesla and SpaceX. Other important examples include the large investments in nuclear fusion that feature among the portfolios of two other internet billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel.


But this is not, yet, a legitimate basis for satisfaction, let alone complacency, on the part of those of us working in pioneering technological fields. Why not? Simply because it is too limited and, ambitious though it may be by historical standards, not ambitious enough. All of the efforts listed above were performed in the private sector and with the goal of making big profits reasonably soon, with the exception of the X Prize, and even it only slightly counts as an exception, because its main attraction to competitors was the profit to be had down the road as a result of the technology developed, rather than the prize pot itself.

This inherently imposes a pretty ironclad restriction on the anticipated time frame for progress. For efforts that are likely to take upwards of 20 years to come to genuine fruition, such as (wait for it) the medical defeat of aging, a standard commercial model seems inapplicable-although Calico, set up by Google as a company, seems nevertheless to be saying that it will take a really long view in terms of profitability.

Areas not attractive to investors, especially if they are also unattractive to governments (as high-risk, high-gain projects generally are), are the province of philanthropy. Yet, as of now only a very few of those with personal wealth sufficient to make a big difference have recognized this to the point of providing substantial funds on a purely philanthropic basis. SENS Research Foundation has been privileged to benefit from a few of those exceptions, but far more is needed.

So, where does philanthropic funding go? Overwhelmingly, it goes to areas that, while indisputably laudable, are either not technological at all or are not technologically ambitious at all, but are unlikely to be profitable anyway because they will benefit those without the means to pay.

Indeed, some of the world's largest philanthropic organizations (the Gates Foundation comes particularly to mind) explicitly prioritize efforts that specifically help the disadvantaged, rather than ones that will help everybody but not for a long time to come.

My purpose in setting out this quite well-known state of affairs is to ask the key question: Does this bias in philanthropy against high-risk, high-gain efforts make sense? In posing this question, I must start by clarifying why it is a reasonable question at all, because your first thought may be: Why should a philanthropist's choices need to have any objective justification? Surely one can do what one likes with one's money, without needing to explain one's decisions to anyone? I am not at all disputing that. Rather, I am following the lead of a rapidly growing community that has come together under the banner of "effective altruism" (EA).

The EA community starts, by and large, from the ethical standpoint of utilitarianism, i.e., the view that the best action to take at any point is that which maximizes total happiness and minimizes total unhappiness, and it seeks to identify those philanthropic causes that give the best value for money by that metric. In this way, it does not challenge the right of donors to give where they may; rather, it seeks to help those donors whose explicit goal is to make the most difference to make choices that achieve that end.

There are quite a few such donors, including (I suspect) some extremely wealthy ones, so I believe that the EA community is doing the world a very important service.

It turns out, however, that the merit of high-risk, high-gain philanthropy is a topic of considerable controversy within EA circles. A view held by some prominent EAs is that there should be a built-in-and indeed strong-bias against such projects, because there is an unavoidable tendency, for which one must compensate, to be overoptimistic about how likely such a project will be to succeed and how soon.



As you might expect, I do not agree. Sure it's great to help the disadvantaged, but I am convinced that in the long term humanity suffers as a result of aiming high too rarely. Moreover, those who have the vision to see how truly pioneering technological progress might be achieved are few and far between, and the proof-of-concept work that is all that is required to elevate the idea to the point where it is no longer high-risk tends to be relatively inexpensive.

So even if the total philanthropic pot were fixed (which is a distinctly fragile assumption in the first place), the loss to less pioneering causes from even a 100-fold elevation of support for ambitious ideas would be negligible. And above all, the charge of over-optimism is misplaced, because making more effort to make a given breakthrough will still cause it to be made sooner than without the extra effort; however, that may compare with how long it was initially expected to take.

Accordingly, I call on all those in a position to increase philanthropic funding to ambitious causes-whether that be the wealthy, their friends, and colleagues, or anyone with wide influence-to acknowledge that we are currently missing opportunities to alleviate huge quantities of future suffering by working insufficiently hard to reach for the stars.

Whether it be aging, climate change, pandemics, or any other phenomenon that causes or risks causing widespread suffering, we must try harder to hasten the process of consigning it to history.