Denkenberger🔸
Bio
Participation4
Dr. David Denkenberger co-founded and is a director at 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 156 publications (>5600 citations, >60,000 downloads, h-index = 38, 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, Radio New Zealand, 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, Australian National University, 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.
Posts 38
Comments800
Predators kill quickly. Insecticides and disease rarely do.
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Some predators swallow whole, so the death takes longer. But the bigger issues are probably disease and starvation, which generally take a long time and are common. So I think the average percent time of suffering of insects is much longer than your example, and probably than humans.
Thanks! There's this estimate in the LW article:
Meanwhile, protecting the grid's "6,000 most critical transformers" with SolidGrounds would cost 3-4 billion dollars to the US. That's 0.3% of the 2021 infrastructure bill, recuperable within the year!Â
Even if you think democracy and good values would eventually recover if the world stayed not too different from our history, there are other failure modes. First, the world could be more susceptible to global totalitarianism, which could create permanent lock in. Second, temporary worse values could influence the values of AGI, which then could be locked in.
I think you've made a lot of good points. But solutions to factory farming are broader than just cultivated meat. Plant-based meat is already much closer in cost and more acceptable to consumers. And the source of protein could come from fungus, bacteria, leaf protein, seaweed, etc., though those are probably not as acceptable as regular plants. It's also possible that AGI could help engineer a meat substitute that actually tastes better than animal meat, perhaps by triggering sweet taste buds without actually having appreciable sugar.
I was too optimistic in the book Feeding Everyone No Matter What assuming that the fish production globally could be similar to that of current coastal upwelling areas. However, we did find that seaweed grows better in nuclear winter than in normal times.
You do realize, I hope, that this all sounds wildly speculative to anyone who works in biomedical research?Â
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Well, not Aubrey de Grey. :) But seriously, let's say that one asked biomedical researchers, "Imagine a scenario where you had billions of researchers much more capable than the best scientists who ever lived thinking for centuries of subjective time and running trillions of in vitro experiments and billions of in vivo experiments on small animals and could create nano bots (e.g. white blood cells) and could experiment on thousands of recently deceased people, do you think they could solve aging?" I would be interested in the percentage of them who would describe this as wildly speculative.
It builds assumption on top of assumption.Â
Basically you're saying 'trust us, ASI can do ANYTHING it needs to do to gather ALL the data it needs, by any means necessary, to solve all diseases quickly, reliably, with no side-effects, no tradeoffs, and no catastrophic tragedies that would turn public opinion against the whole enterprise'.Â
That is not a compelling argument to me at all, and I think its implausibility undercuts the common talking point among e/accs and pro-AI lobbyists that 'ASI would cure death quickly and easily'
To be clear, I disagree with high confidence that ASI would cure death quickly and easily, especially if that means death is actually cured, rather than we have a cure available. Indeed, catastrophic tragedies could turn public opinion against the whole enterprise. And I'm not claiming there would be no trade-offs, especially because many people say now they don't want to live forever. I'm also not claiming no side effects, but that the alternative of dying would be worse. I think we should pause at AGI because ASI would be dangerous. But if ASI were aligned, I do think it is plausible that it could quickly develop a cure for aging.
I just wanted to give props to this.