Now that April Fools' day has passed, I feel compelled to say that the analogy to AI development here is not very good. The joke is good, but the analogy is not.
(You might think we shouldn't generally criticize April Fools' day analogies, but I disagree. They're good fun, but many people also take them seriously. For example, in 2022 MIRI's post about Death with Dignity appeared to be taken seriously by many.)
The current value added to the economy from minerals is worth less than 1% of total Gross World Product. In other words, the scarcity of minerals (such as metal ores) is simply not a big factor bottlenecking economic value in the world. As a result, mining asteroids for their minerals and bringing them back to Earth, even if it could be done profitably, would likely not result in much improvement to human welfare. [ETA: In response to pushback, I want to clarify that my argument assumes that minerals are not excellent substitutes for other things in the world, which I think is true, but I agree I handwaved this detail away.]
By contrast, AI has a much larger potential to make people better off. If AI can substitute for researchers and labor more generally, it could likely make vast improvements to medicine, and raise material well-being by several orders of magnitude, extending human lifespan and welfare in a way that would be unprecedented in human history.
The analogy to asteroid mining therefore makes a comparison between something that has both immense upside and downside potential, to something that largely only has downside potential (at least in the way discussed here), without much corresponding upside. This comparison seems misleading to me.
I've spoken previously about how omitting the upside potential from AI is a misleading rhetorical tactic in this comment.
Nice one - given the obvious precedent, you should be all good getting 50 million or so from OpenPhil for starters, then hopefully the market will take you from there to serious impact.
As a minor side question, I'm not quite sure how you will achieve "high" impact. With my limited knowledge, the impact of asteroids is usually rather low, at something close to ground level. Perhaps aiming for the top of Mt. Everest might be a good start?
@Alexander_Berger Happy to explore a win-win-win opportunity! We are already in communications with VCs, but we'd love to get some philanthropic interest as well! Not donating to us will be an astronomical waste.
For $50M, we'd even consider giving you a permanent seat on our Board of Concurrers!