High impact startup idea: make a decent carbon emissions model for flights.
Current ones simply use flight emissions which makes direct flights look low-emission. But in reality, some of these flights wouldn't even be there if people could be spread over existing indirect flights more efficiently, which is why they're cheaper too. Emission models should be relative to counterfactual.
The startup can be for-profit. If you're lucky, better models already exist in scientific literature. Ideal for the AI for good-crowd.
My guess is that a few man-years work could have a big carbon emissions impact here.
Crossposted to Less Wrong
‘Like most of life’s dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’
J Dmitri Gallow
Epistemic status
I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall...
Thanks to Bruce Friedrich, Seth Ariel Green, Tobias Leenaert, Jan Willem Bolderdijk, Martine van Haperen, Herman Rohrbach, Chris Popa and Elizabeth Alvarez for comments. Claude helped structure the text. Ideas and mistakes are my own. I currently work with ProVeg International. The prize I propose would be defined and judged by an independent committee, and its money would fund scaling the winning solution(s), not ProVeg or the winner.
TL/DR
* EA could d...
This post is part of the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) series on how to allocate funding across causes when it is uncertain what matters most.
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High impact startup idea: make a decent carbon emissions model for flights.
Current ones simply use flight emissions which makes direct flights look low-emission. But in reality, some of these flights wouldn't even be there if people could be spread over existing indirect flights more efficiently, which is why they're cheaper too. Emission models should be relative to counterfactual.
The startup can be for-profit. If you're lucky, better models already exist in scientific literature. Ideal for the AI for good-crowd.
My guess is that a few man-years work could have a big carbon emissions impact here.