Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
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.
...
Summary
1. With new funding potentially entering the effective altruism ecosystem, we wanted to estimate how much more the wild animal welfare (WAW) movement could productively absorb. We asked organizations with a public, dedicated WAW workstream to estimate their own room for more funding (RFMF). Although this does not capture the whole movement, we believe it captures a substantive fraction of it.
2. Summed across the five organizations that took part, the estimates point to...
Hi, I'm thinking about a possibly new approach to AI safety. Call it AI monitoring and safe shutdown.
Safe shutdown, riffs on the idea of the big red button, but adapts it for use in simpler systems. If there was a big red button, who gets to press it and how? This involves talking to law enforcement, legal and policy. Big red buttons might be useful for non learning systems, large autonomous drones and self-driving cars are two system that might suffer from software failings and need to be shutdown safely if possible (or precipitously if the risks from hard shutdown are less than it's continued operation).
The monitoring side of thing asks what kind of registration and monitoring we should have for AIs and autonomous systems. Building on work on aircraft monitoring, what would the needs around autonomous system be?
Is this a neglected/valuable cause area? If so, I'm at an early stage and could use other people to help out.