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/āglobal 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.
Denkenbergeršø
Okāthatās fair. Thereās also the issue that doom means very different things to different people.
Sometimes it means species per square acre, other times species evenness, richness, Shannon index, Simpsonās index, or Hill number. In practice, usually only mammals, birds, trees, and shrub species are measured, ignoring the smaller plants, animals, and fungi.
Are any of these just total number? Because from a long-term perspective, since extinction is irreversible (at this point), then you can always re-establish density, etc. Nitpick: acre is an area measure, so square acre is incorrect.
Marcus has been a hardcore earn-to-give EA. Heās personally donated ~$1.5m, representing >60% of his lifetime earnings, primarily to animal welfare.
I just wanted to give props to this.
Why the huge loss? Real estate prices in the UK havenāt dropped, and the depreciation on something that old shouldnāt be significant.
Why the downvotes?
Predators kill quickly. Insecticides and disease rarely do.
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! Thereās this estimate in the LW article:
Meanwhile, protecting the gridās ā6,000 most critical transformersā with SolidGrounds would cost 3-4 billion dollars to the US. Thatās 0.3% of the 2021 infrastructure bill, recuperable within the year!
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 youāve 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. Itās 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?
Well, not Aubrey de Grey. :) But seriously, letās say that one asked biomedical researchers, āImagine 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?ā I would be interested in the percentage of them who would describe this as wildly speculative.
It builds assumption on top of assumption.
Basically youāre saying ātrust 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 enterpriseā.
That is not a compelling argument to me at all, and I think its implausibility undercuts the common talking point among e/āaccs and pro-AI lobbyists that āASI would cure death quickly and easilyā
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 Iām not claiming there would be no trade-offs, especially because many people say now they donāt want to live forever. Iām 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.
Iām extremely skeptical that it would be possible to āsimulate biology from first principlesā in any computationally feasible way, given the hierarchical complexity of biology across huge range of scalesāboth spatial (from biomolecules to organelles to cells, tissues, organs, and organism) and temporal (from femtoseconds to decades). We just donāt have any āfirst principlesā in biology that are analogous to physical laws that could be used to simulate planet formation or weather.
It could simulate individual atoms, and work up from there. Yes, that is prohibitively computationally expensive now, but the ASI could scale up computation many OOMs and could probably model it much more efficiently than we could. It probably wouldnāt need to model all the atoms because of sub modeling the different scales you note (like we do with weather). Iām not confident that it could do this in a few years, but I think itās generally a risky bet to say that ASI canāt figure out something quickly.
We also donāt have the data required to ārun trillions of lab-on-a-chip experimentsā.
I was saying it could gather data with those experiments, e.g. testing out many different nanobots/ādrugs on many different types of tissue. Why would it need to have data in order to run the experiments?
And I cannot imagine any situations in which ānano bots that could remove cancer cellsā could be deployed in living humans without the first several thousands patients dying in surprising and gruesome ways.
It could experiment on living cancer tissue in vitro. It looks like transgenic Zebrafish get cancer in 2-4 weeks. And as I commented below, it could wait until after death to try to fixāmore than 20k people donate their body to science a year.
There was this paper (not by ALLFED) saying fish catch would generally be lower in nuclear winter. However, the model does not take into account the fact that as medium and large fish are removed, there would be more small fish that people could catch (what I call, āfishing lower on the food chainā). We want to model this and the feasibility of converting fishing boats to catch the smaller fish.
An option to circumvent current laws would be the person dying, and then being fixed by the tech and revived. This could be thought of as like āfast cryonics.ā
Letās break this into two questions:
1. After a few years of ASI, will the ASI be able to stop or reverse aging?
2. After a few years of ASI, will hardly anyone die of aging related diseases?
Letās tackle number one first. Itās true the ASI would not be able to do long term human trials the regular way. However, I think it could learn a lot from the data from running trillions of lab-on-a-chip experiments. I think it could develop nano bots that could remove cancer cells and repair aging related damage. And it could get quick feedback by making C. elegans, etc immortal. It might also be able to simulate biology from first principles in order to run the equivalent of decades long human trials.I also think it could develop noninvasive (or at least non-destructive) scanning techniques that would allow someoneās consciousness to be simulated. And even if that doesnāt count, it might even be able to build up a new biological human that has equivalent consciousness to the original (which still may not count depending on oneās values). There are likely many other routes to quick longevity that I canāt think of but an ASI could.
As for the second question, would people allow the, e.g., repair nano bots into their bodies? One subquestion is whether countries would allow it. Based on current laws, probably not, though itās possible they would change quickly due to ASI (and people could go into international waters). Another subquestion is if it is legal, would people do it? Obviously some people would not, but if the alternative is a soon death, I think many people would.
Some people are concerned about AI x-risk, and they have P(doom)s in the 5ā25% range. I donāt get that. I canāt pass an Ideological Turing Test for someone who sees all these problems, but still expects us to avert extinction with >75% probability. I donāt understand what would lead one to believe that this is what things look like when weāre on track to solving a problem.
P(doom) does not necessarily equal extinction. Paul Christiano had (in 2023) P(AI takeover) at 22%, and P(most humans die from takeover) = 11% (but then other ways of most people dying). But he has much lower probabilities of extinction due to pseudo pico kindness, acausal trade, etc.
Outside of EA, when people get rich I doubt there are a bunch of charity lobbyists breathing down their necks?
Yes, there are. This is the high net worth individual strategy that so many charities use (one of my universities even had a mini course on how to do it).
Do we need a scared reaction option on the EA Forum?
If so, consider having a way to get out fast if the SHTF.