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.
I think this is a useful project.
You currently have ALLFED classified as Disaster Relief. I think it's closer to AI Existential Risk because:
As for your Longtermist calculation, it goes out 1 trillion years, but you are assuming roughly current population, so no expansion into space? Not that it matters for ranking - when I did longtermist cost effectiveness calculations (here and here), I just put it in terms of long-run future improvement and didn't try to calculate lives saved.
Did you include this or this?
Thanks! I haven't thought too much about your question, because fortunately ALLFED team members are flexible with meeting times so they make my New Zealand time zone work (and really any time zone). But I would note that New Zealand is only 3 to 5 hours different from California, depending on the time of year. There are many countries outside of NATO with time zones not very far from EA hubs, but most of them are not high income and not English-speaking, so that doesn't work for a lot of people (though it's true that living costs in lower income countries can be much lower). There are European countries outside of NATO, but I expect the EMP to still hit them. You can get some reduction in risk just living somewhat outside of big NATO cities.
I think another important consideration is risk. With AI compressing timelines, if one believes there is a 1% per year higher risk of dying due to nuclear war or extreme pandemic in a big city in NATO versus a safer place, and one values one's life at ~$10 million, that is $100,000 per year incentive not to live there (not including family members). Furthermore, if one thinks there is some chance of radical life extension, this number would be significantly larger. This risk can be mitigated to some extent with leaving quickly, but I haven't found many people who have such a plan.
Sounds promising. Are you interested in resilience to AI catastrophes or only prevention?
I agree - AI estimates we could get cost parity to beef burgers by building a 100,000 tonne dry per year factory that is far larger than anything out there now (~2% of global burgers) (more like paper factory size). But that would cost close to $1B. I'm pretty sure that 2% of consumers would accept current taste of plant based burgers if they were slightly cheaper, but that's a big investment.
Repeating my comment from LW as I would like feedback from people here too:
A lot of people think we should pause at AGI, but one problem is that AI capabilities are spiky, so we will probably get powerful and dangerous capabilities even before it is human level at all tasks. So I was thinking what might actually be politically/economically feasible is pausing further development once they get an automated AI researcher, because all those AI capability researchers are not going to be happy about being laid off. So we could turn them into AI safety researchers!
Very helpful!
Why would losing GPS prevent processing?
Even COVID can be considered an existential risk if it prolongs the time of perils. What's your estimate of the global economic impact over a year?
AI estimates that global knowledge work is ~$35T/yr and that the value of AI is ~6x the revenue (though that could change). That would imply we would only need ~$6T/yr AI revenue to substitute for all knowledge work. Now it is true that AI would be affecting the capital side of gross world product (GWP) (~$60T/yr), and that the GWP would grow by then. But there is the time delay of diffusion, indicating that the impact of the AI at the time would be much larger eventually. So I think even $1-3T/yr revenue with strong growth would be fairly strong evidence for AGI/TAI.
Yeah, the funding situation in nuclear security is still dire. Depending on how you count, the cuts in US government funding various things that charities may want to make up for were greater than $50 billion per year.
I agree there is some overlap between these principles and EA principles. But I still think the EAs are more willing to debate them. For instance, the first implies torture is never justified (and this is a common view in UU), but some EAs will debate the cases where it could be justified. Also, maximizing utility does not necessarily push you to justice and equity. Spiritual growth does not apply to most of EA. And EAs generally question environmental/biodiversity principles.