D

Denkenberger🔸

Director, Associate Professor @ Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), University of Canterbury
2821 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)Christchurch, New Zealand

Bio

Participation
3

Dr. David Denkenberger co-founded and directs the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED.info) and donates half his income to it. He received his B.S. from Penn State in Engineering Science, his masters from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Building Systems Program. His dissertation was on an expanded microchannel heat exchanger, which he patented. He is an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in mechanical engineering. He received the National Merit Scholarship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, is a Penn State distinguished alumnus, and is a registered professional engineer. He has authored or co-authored 143 publications (>4800 citations, >50,000 downloads, h-index = 36, second most prolific author in the existential/global catastrophic risk field), including the book Feeding Everyone no Matter What: Managing Food Security after Global Catastrophe. His food work has been featured in over 25 countries, over 300 articles, including Science, Vox, Business Insider, Wikipedia, Deutchlandfunk (German Public Radio online), Discovery Channel Online News, Gizmodo, Phys.org, and Science Daily. He has given interviews on 80,000 Hours podcast (here and here) and Estonian Public Radio, WGBH Radio, Boston, and WCAI Radio on Cape Cod, USA. He has given over 80 external presentations, including ones on food at Harvard University, MIT, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Cornell University, University of California Los Angeles, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos National Lab, Imperial College, and University College London.

How others can help me

Referring potential volunteers, workers, board members and donors to ALLFED.

How I can help others

Being effective in academia, balancing direct work and earning to give, time management.

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That's a very advanced model that takes into account AGI - way better than my heuristic!

I can't seem to find it now, but I think someone calculated that funding to EA was higher in 2023 and 2024 than any year except 2022.

I think a key consideration here is whether AI disempowerment of humans, where humans are at least as well off as now, counts as X risk (and, as an aside, P(doom)). Since it would be destruction of humanity's long-term potential, I think Bostrom would say that disempowerment is an X risk, but Ord may not.

I was referring to this earlier academic article. I've also heard of discussion along a similar vein in the early days of EA.

Minor point, but I’ve seen big tent EA as referring to applying effectiveness techniques on any charity. Then maybe broad current EA causes could be called the middle-sized tent. Then just GCR/longtermism could be called the small tent (which 80k already largely pivoted to years ago, at least considering their impact multipliers). Then just AI could be the very small tent.

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