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Huge +1 to this. If anybody is reading this and wants to get funded to start down this career track, please apply to Open Phil’s biosecurity scholarship: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/biosecurity/open-philanthropy-biosecurity-scholarships
The program supports independent projects for people to learn about a field as well as degree programs.
I think this is a great post, not only due to the importance of biosecurity but also because EA currently has so little to offer to engineers. For example, even the career experts at 80K don’t give much of a roadmap: “It seems hard to address our top recommended problems right now by working as an engineer, so if you’re committed to doing that, then earning to give might be the best path.”
As an aerospace engineer myself, I think our advice could be much better and more detailed if we tried! I agree that biosecurity seems like the top area, with lots of innovation needed from improved ventilation systems to faster mRNA vaccine factories. In amongst the many biosecurity projects, I could also imagine nudging people towards:
Early research into developing new forms of energy generation (things like advanced geothermal, nuclear, and fusion)
Maybe stuff like building large, civilizational-resilience bunkers, although this is very speculative and you’d have to independently start a whole company since few people are working on it today.
Research into the safety and feasibility of various proposed “geoengineering” climate interventions.
I have a bunch of more detailed thoughts/notes on this which I’m planning to work into a series of Forum posts sometime soon.
Bunkers is something I didn’t include in my list because I don’t have stable well-formed opinions on it yet, but if someone is interested in working on bunkers I’d definitely encourage them to contact me at the link above!
And, wow, that 80K quote is very out of date!
At present in biosecurity, I would be substantially more excited about meeting a marginal EA engineer than a marginal EA bio PhD or policy advocate. (Not that more of those wouldn’t be great!) I’m not sure how many marginal engineers I would need before that ceased to be the case – but right now the differential in numbers is so big that even a few promising people would make a huge difference.
There are also alternative proteins and resilient foods (ALLFED) for physical engineers.
I wrote a twitter thread about what EA engineers can do about our recommended problem areas:
https://twitter.com/ben_j_todd/status/1491401046706782210
I hope we can update the (rather old) ‘advice by expertise’ article before too long. And eventually I hope we can write an engineering career profile.
Thanks for the writeup, I very much agree! Also on the engineering side, some are thinking about using microwaves instead of UV to disrupt airborne pathogens.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089037/
https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2162707/afrl-scientists-investigate-can-microwaves-reduce-viability-of-airborne-coronav/
Like Jackson mentioned, another biosecurity-relevant intervention where I think engineers would be useful would be in helping to design pandemic-safe refuges to help preserve civilization. My current belief as a non-expert is that this is quite high on I/N/T, though as usual there are nontrivial downside risks for a plan that’s executed poorly.
There are also cobenefits for shielding against risks other than bio, though my current best guess is that shielding against biorisk is the most important reason for refuges.
I’d be excited to talk to (civil) engineering types who are potentially interested in working on this, especially if they have prior experience running large projects and/or have at least some pre-existing network among biosecurity EAs.
Note that I’m very far from a biosecurity expert, and would not know many of the relevant crucial considerations.
Does anyone know about the biosecurity opportunities available for software engineers?
You might find some answers in the question on computational biology thesis topic suggestions or some ideas in this post on project ideas in biosecurity, but/and I second Will’s idea of moving this into its own question post if you want to solicit more suggestions.
I feel conflicted about this comment. On the one hand, I feel like I can see and appreciate the sequence of events that led you to put it here, and sympathise with its content. On the other hand, it’s off-topic: this isn’t what this post is about, and I’d prefer discussion of software developers in biosecurity to happen somewhere else. Maybe make a Question post?
An interesting post! It seems like the post is doing several things:
(1) positing some potential problems and gaps in current efforts in biosecurity. (2) suggesting some possible steps that could be taken to address them. (3) suggesting or arguing that engineers and materials scientists would be well-placed to undertake or contribute to these steps.
Your comments on all three seem plausible to me (a non-expert). But you seem to provide more links and evidence for (2) than (1) or (3).
Since (2) and (3) are dependent upon (1) being correct, I’d be interested in what sorts of evidence you have for it. E.g. what has led you to make the following claims?
The whole of “the problem” section, especially “Unfortunately, people with these backgrounds are currently severely lacking in biosecurity.”
“PPE that was highly effective, easy to use, and cheap to distribute… is currently laughably neglected.”
“relatively little time and money have gone into either implementing these technologies or identifying promising alternatives.”
Regarding (3), I have similar but lower priority questions. That case seems more intuitive to me.