To the unkept mind these seem like a waste of space and time and money.
Why genetic material is so important especially today?
I like to think of samples as books, the gene-bank as a library. Today we are inefficient in GM of crops, at least not to the point where we can pick and choose and everything comes out squeaky clean. Complicated process ya know. But with AGI, and general tools in the future, we might be on course to have a pick and choose approach to how we want our crops to act and how to produce, what and in what quantity.
The more samples, the more books, the more data and unique genetic pathways to produce the food, the higher the level of refinement.
Basically these samples are like the data we scrape now and teach the LLMs, but in biology.
Mr.Addison, critiquing an organization for being too western and western-focused is completely credible when that organization employs people only in the developed world with people and resumes that imply high privilege in the western society too.
This is not a critique on the people working these jobs, but on the organizational policy as a whole.
My opinion that 80.000 hours is turning into an echo-chamber is completely valid, because it would take 5 minutes to browse the employees and their backgrounds.
To wrap it up, I can be productive in engaging, literally look down and see my response to Michael, the fact that some people disliked my OPINION, is not good enough for me to decide that I am simply here for anger-farming.