Observatorio de Riesgos Catastróficos Globales (ORCG) is a scientific diplomacy organization that emerged in February 2023 to formulate governance proposals that allow the comprehensive management of different global risks in Spanish-speaking countries. We connect decision-makers with experts to achieve our mission, producing evidence-based publications. In this context, we have worked on several projects on advanced artificial intelligence risks, biological risks, and food risks such as nuclear winter.
Since its inception, the organization has accumulated valuable experience and generated extensive production. This includes four reports, one produced in collaboration with the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). In addition, we have produced four academic articles, three of which have been accepted for publication in specialized journals. We have also created three policy recommendations and/or working documents and four notes in collaboration with institutions such as the Simon Institute for Long-term Governance. In addition, the organization has developed abundant informative material, such as web articles, videos, conferences, and infographics.
During these nine months of activity, the Observatory has established relationships with actors in Spanish-speaking countries, especially highlighting the collaboration with the regional cooperation spaces of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), as well as with risk management offices at the national level. In this context, we have supported the formulation of Argentina's National Plan for Disaster Risk Reduction 2024-2030. Our contribution stands out with a specific chapter on extreme food catastrophes, which was incorporated into the work manual of the Information and Risk Scenarios Commission (Technical Commission No. 7).
We invite you to send any questions and/or requests to [email protected]. You can contribute to the mitigation of Global Catastrophic Risks by donating.
Resilient food solutions to avoid mass starvation during a nuclear winter in Argentina, REDER Journal, Accepted, pending publication.
Systematic review of taxonomies of risks associated with artificial intelligence, Analecta Política Journal, Accepted, pending publication.
The EU AI Act: A pioneering effort to regulate frontier AI?, Journal IberamIA, Accepted, pending publication.
Operationalizing AI Global Governance Democratization, submitted to call for papers of Office of the Envoy of the Secretary General for Technology, Non-public document.
Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm?
We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months:
* 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced techniques to prevent their actions being logged by OpenAI and 700 of them launched...
TLDR: Everyone’s talking about what the money could do, but few about how to decide where it goes.
This post is part of the new series of articles on cross-cause giving and the new wave of philanthropy. Stay tuned to the EA Forum and our Substack for the latest takes on topics such as giving now vs. later, common pitfalls in cause prioritization, and other crucial considerations from the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) team...
Summary:
First, I give several different angles on how I feel about reinforcement learning:
* Theoretical case: RL is a black-box source of agency — this should give us classic misalignment worries, especially compared to agency-via-scaffolding
* Recent incidents (huggingface etc) and more mundane forms of misaligned behaviour in personal use give me bad vibes about the direction-of-travel of recent AI progress
* I’m worried things might get worse:...
