A New Yorker article describing the Effective Altruism movement caught my eye this week, because it reminded me of a young couple my husband and I knew over a decade ago. They were high-tech workers who lived simply–no cars, small dwelling, minimal furnishings–and contributed well over half of their net earnings to less fortunate people in other countries. The idea was that well-off people can most effectively share their fortunes by making large contributions to relatively inexpensive, high-impact interventions, such as cataract removal, malaria nets, or de-worming.

Donating to the basic health of humans who are currently alive seems ethical in the purest sense, worthy of unequivocal admiration. The EA movement of today, however, has been highjacked by millionaires and billionaires, who, using the egregious reasoning of markets that seems to have driven rational thought from all westerners heads, now posit EA should seek the highest return on investment.

Saving the most people per dollar sounds ok until you hear their solution: EA is focused on saving unborn persons from the depredations of malevolent AI, a threat that will emerge, I suppose, sometime after the singularity. That hasn’t happened yet, BTW, although my phone, which often makes call, sends texts, and plays videos while resting in my pocket, and which frequently jumps to a new screen when I am actively consulting it, already seems to be asserting its independence.

Cryptocurrency moguls diverting funds from health interventions for living people to preventing AI from destroying unborn people are…overthinking? Solving the problem of insufficient aggrandizement? Mirror-gazing into the Magic Mirror until reality dissolves?

In the same issue of the magazine, a different article mentions that wildlife populations have fallen by two-thirds since 1970, and that at least a third of all nonhuman species will have become extinct by 2050. Meanwhile, my last issue of Science presented the new-to-me concept of old growth grasslands; apparently grasslands gain complexity over time just as forests do, and perform similar cleansing and healing functions for the planet, while humans have been destroying them at will, assuming they repopulate quickly.

To save something today that needed saving yesterday, maybe the EA group could disperse birth control methods to Earth’s most destructive species. What would the Lorax say?