It’s not on the 80k list of “other global issues”, and doesn’t come up on a quick search of Google or this forum, so I’d guess not. One reason might be that the scale isn’t large enough—it seems much harder to get existential risk from GMOs than from, say, engineered pandemics.
Some of the agricultural catastrophes that the solutions that the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) are working on address include super crop disease, bacterium that out competes beneficial bacteria, and super crop pest (animal), all of which could be related to genetic modification.
Is there much EA work into tail risk from GMOs ruining crops or ecosystems?
If not, why not?
It’s not on the 80k list of “other global issues”, and doesn’t come up on a quick search of Google or this forum, so I’d guess not. One reason might be that the scale isn’t large enough—it seems much harder to get existential risk from GMOs than from, say, engineered pandemics.
Yeah, I’d expect it to be a global catastrophic risk rather than existential risk.
Some of the agricultural catastrophes that the solutions that the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) are working on address include super crop disease, bacterium that out competes beneficial bacteria, and super crop pest (animal), all of which could be related to genetic modification.