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I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
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Epistemic status: Wrote this pretty fast, probably ~70% confident some version of the thesis claim is true, would welcome being proven demonstrably wrong.
Context: I’m a grantmaker focused on alt-protein and am fairly well-connected/moderately in the loop of what animal welfare grantmakers are doing.
This post was significantly inspired by “...
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Thanks for posting this question. I'll take a stab at it.
Yes, any use of AI that aims to improve society counts as AI for social good.
It's hard to know because this question is so broad - one could spend their entire life investigating it. It would be helpful to narrow down your question into something more specific, like "the projected future impact of agricultural applications of robotics on human well-being". Then you could divide agricultural applications of robotics into different use cases and predict how each use case would affect the outcome you're interested in (in this case, well-being) and how much. Also, the counterfactual impact of an individual new technology (such as robotics) is hard to isolate, because technologies are very often used together in different combinations (such as robotics + computer vision + hardware accelerators for AI + ...), and because technologies interact with other technologies and other social systems in complex ways.
Once you've narrowed down to a more specific question, you've got something you could do an entire year-long research project on. We wouldn't be able to answer your research question on the EA Forum overnight, although we may be able to point you to relevant resources if you ask a specific question.
Finally, a shameless plug: if you're interested in using AI to improve the world as effectively as possible, I invite you to join my Slack.
I hope this helps!
Also, for questions on the EA Forum, I recommend writing a short title and a longer description if needed. The current title of this post doesn't fit on the front page, so it's hard to know what your question is about before clicking on it.
Here may be a better question: Would you estimate that robotics is a good field to go into for for profit entrepreneurship that tries to make a direct impact?
Any resources from the previous questions would also be helpful, thank you!