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.
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.
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And, wow, that 80K quote is very out of date!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.
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.