I enjoyed your essay, and I think it's good that you're getting people talking about this. I don't think we can expect to get the same sort of moral improvemen

I enjoyed your essay, and I think it's good that you're getting people talking about this. I don't think we can expect to get the same sort of moral improvement we do in the fastest-moving areas of technology by throwing technology at the problem of morality. We're still not all that far along in learning how to treat mental illnesses, and using medicine to make people more moral would probably be similarly difficult. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not a solution, just that we shouldn't be surprised if building a solution of that sort turns out to have a difficulty more like curing PTSD than preventing childbed fever. I also think that making humans act more morally probably has more to do with helping us recognize and think clearly about moral decisions, than making us care more. One of the reasons the Gates foundation is special is that they're trying to help people efficiently. The way human minds are built makes it hard to realize that it's important to be efficient at doing good, rather than just to make an effort. I guess this is coming from someone whose empathy dial is turned up to eleven anyway, though, so it could also be that different people have different problems to overcome to be more moral. The problems I had were not forgetting about causes of suffering just because they don't happen to be staring me in the face at the moment, and then focusing on the right things. The website LessWrong has some interesting writing about why humans suck at charity http://lesswrong.com/lw/aid/heuristics_and_biases_in_charity/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/aid/heuristics_and_biases_in_charity... , and learning how to reason better in general is the main thing they write about. The main effects the stuff I read there has had on my morality-related actions are that I take my career more seriously (I don't actually care that much about more money for me, but I do care about more resources for improving the world), and I worry less about small stuff (I accept inefficiencies in my own life if fixing them doesn't look worth the effort, and don't get distracted by projects that would help people but only a small amount). Some of what you're talking about here - the idea of giving flamethrowers to children - sounds similar to the idea of existential risk, though on a smaller scale. If you don't already know if it, you may find it relevant.