Short answer:
Donate to MIRI, or split between MIRI and GiveWell charities if you want some fuzzies for short-term helping.
Long answer:
I’m a negative utilitarian (NU) and have been thinking since 2007 about the sign of MIRI for NUs. (Here’s some relevant discussion.) I give ~70% chance that MIRI’s impact is net good by NU lights and ~30% that it’s net bad, but given MIRI’s high impact, the expected value of MIRI is still very positive.
As far as your question: I’d put the probability of uncontrolled AI creating hells higher than 1 in 10,000 and the probability that MIRI as a whole prevents that from happening higher than 1 in 10,000,000. Say such hells used 10^-15 of the AI’s total computing resources. Assuming computing power to create ~10^30 humans for ~10^10 years, MIRI would prevent in expectation ~10^18 hell-years. Assuming MIRI’s total budget ever is $1 billion (too high), that’s ~10^9 hell-years prevented per dollar. Now apply rigorous discounts to account for priors against astronomical impacts and various other far-future-dampening effects. MIRI still seems very promising at the end of the calculation.
What’s the reason for assuming that? Is it based on a general feeling that value is complex, and you don’t want to generalize much beyond the prototype cases? That would be similar to someone who really cares about piston steam engines but doesn’t care much about other types of steam engines, much less other types of engines or mechanical systems.
I would tend to think that a prototypical case of a human noticing his own qualia involves some kind of higher-order reflection that yields the quasi-perceptual illusions that illusionism talks about with reference to some mental state being reflected upon (such as redness, painfulness, feeling at peace, etc). The specific ways that humans do this reflection and report on it are complex, but it’s plausible that other animals might do simpler forms of such things in their own ways, and I would tend to think that those simpler forms might still count for something (in a similar way as other types of engines may still be somewhat interesting to a piston-steam-engine aficionado). Also, I think some states in which we don’t actively notice our qualia probably also matter morally, such as when we’re in flow states totally absorbed in some task.
Here’s an analogy for my point about consciousness. Humans have very complex ways of communicating with each other (verbally and nonverbally), while non-human animals have a more limited set of ways of expressing themselves, but they still do so to greater or lesser degrees. The particular algorithms that humans use to communicate may be very complex and weird, but why focus so heavily on those particular algorithms rather than the more general phenomenon of animal communication?
Anyway, I agree that there can be some cases where humans have a trait to such a greater degree than non-human animals that it’s fair to call the non-human versions of it negligible, such as if the trait in question is playing chess, calculating digits of pi, or writing poetry. I do maintain some probability (maybe like 25%) that the kinds of things in human brains that I would care most about in terms of consciousness are almost entirely absent in chicken brains.