Filling the $100m funding gap in nuclear, since the MacArthur Foundation is pulling out of nuclear policy.

"Since 2015 alone, MacArthur directed 231 grants totaling >$100m in some cases providing more than half the annual funding for individual institutions or programs."
"MacArthur was providing something like 40 to 55 percent of all the funding worldwide of the non-government funding worldwide on nuclear policy”
https://t.co/srsq45ejc7?amp=1 

This is a weird one that is illustrative:

Taking over the US private prison system (described here).

Why:

• Benefits from returns to scale, maybe only available as a "mega project"
• Could literally make a profit (CEA is infinite, pretty much the only way to beat GiveWell?)
• It gives access to institutions, even political capital for reform aligned to social change cause areas
• Almost no one else would do this
• Probably a lot of bad things going on inside of them EAs could improve

There's a ton of drawbacks. These include barriers to entry like regulations and capture which could make this impractical. Once inside, implementation issues such as cultural/institutional challenges will be far outside the typical circle of competence of EA. 

But I think that's the point—this idea has a flavor orthogonal to "New R&D/policy institute for X".

Build up an institution that does the IGM economic experts survey with every scientific field, with paid editors, additionally probabilistic forecasts, monetary incentives for the experts maybe. https://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/

The Center for Election Science could easily make efficient use of greater than $50M a year with infrastructure and ballot initiatives. We've already laid out a plan on how we would spend it. We could also potentially build towards some hyper-aggressive $100M years by including lobbying in the remaining states that don't allow ballot initiatives. In any case, we are woefully underfunded relative to our goals and could at the very least surpass the $50M threshold in a couple of years with sufficient funding. If even greater funding were available, we could build in lobbying following more state-level wins.

For clarity, our lack of funding has already cost us approval voting campaign opportunities and is a big issue for us.

Finally get acceptable information security by throwing money at the problem.

Spend $100M/year to hire, say, 10 world-class security experts and get them everything they need to build the right infrastructure for us, and for e.g. Anthropic.

Here's a few suggestions for near-term megaprojects: 

- Longevity research
- Meat-replacement mega-cost reduction investments (leapfrogging current tech) 
- Eliminating disease-bearing mosquitoes 
- Eliminating all vaccine-preventable diseases worldwide 
- Developing cheap, universal metagenomic scanning for biosecurity (Also see this slightly less ambitious version, mentioned by Alex in a different answer.)
- Large-scale governance reform initiatives 
- Universally available, validated, well-build apps for CBT to reduce depression / increase happiness 
- AI safety (We're doing this one already, so the key players may not have room for funding.)

Impact certificates. Announce that we will purchase NFT's representing altruistic acts created by one of the actors. (Starting now, but with a one-year delay, such that we can't purchase an NFT unless it's at least a year old.) Commit to buy $100M/year of these NFTs, and occasionally reselling them and using the proceeds to buy even more. Promise that our purchasing decisions will be based on our estimate of how much total impact the action represented by the NFT will have. 

Hire ~5 film-studios to each make a movie that concretely shows an AI risk scenario which at least roughly survives the rationalist fiction sniff test. Goal: Improve AI Safety discourse, motivate more smart people to work on this.

Sentinel seems promising

What about creating academic institutes in reputable universities to tackle important problems, eg similar to FHI or CSER, creating research prizes, and sponsoring conferences. I'm mostly thinking about AI Safety, but it may be useful in other areas too.

Hard science funding seems able to absorb this scale of funding, though this might not count as 'EA-specific' projects:
On climate: carbon capture, new solar materials, new battery R&D, maybe even fusion as 'hits-based giving'?
On bio preparedness there's quite a lot, e.g. Cassidy Nelson recommendations, Andy Weber recommendations

Something that could increase economic growth, dramatically reduce inequality of opportunity, and improve well-being of people worldwide:

Try to get as many people connected to the internet with a personal device as possible. 

The stat is that ~50% of the world is connected to the internet is misleading. To be connected you must have used a networked device once in three months, which is far from what most people would expect. 
 

The importance of internet connectivity is hard to understate. It's necessary to function as 21st-century citizens and is the backbone of our societies. It's also necessary for securing various human rights. 

Some quick reasons why internet access is important: 

• Grants access to free education on just about anything 
• Access to banking, communication technologies, etc.
• Increase economic growth, which well-being is somewhat a function of as internet access effectively increases the computational power of the economic system and can 'improve' the substrate upon which it runs (people).
• Increase awareness of EA in general  

Wrote this quickly so apologies for the brevity. I've been working on a longer post where I dive into this in a lot more detail. 

Developing new climate models has costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Useful longtermist climate modelling could include:

• nuclear winter modelling
• volcanic/asteroid impact modelling
• solar geoengineering modelling
• catastrophic (<5C) climate change modelling (note higher end warming is hugely underrepresented in the literature - as argued here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HaXxEtx4QdykBjJi7/betting-on-the-best-case-higher-end-warming-is )

Take some EAs involved in public outreach, some journalists who made probabilistic forecasts on there own volition (Future Perfect people, Matt Yglesias, ?), and buy them their own news media organization to influence politics and raise the sanity- and altruism-waterline.

I have claimed that the first few hundred million dollars of preparation for agricultural and electricity disrupting GCRs is competitive with AGI safety for the longterm, and preparation for agricultural GCRs is more cost effective than GiveWell interventions. Since these catastrophes could happen right away, I think it does make sense to scale up quickly to $100 million per year to get the preparation fast. Beyond research, this money could be used for piloting new technologies and developing response plans and training. To maintain $100 million per year may then be lower cost effectiveness than AGI safety at the expected margin, but would still provide additional value and may be competitive with other priorities. Projects could include subsidizing resilient food sources such as seaweed, cellulosic sugar, methane single cell protein, etc. Or building factories flexibly such that they could switch quickly from producing animal feed or energy to human food. These could easily be many billions of dollars per year.

No idea what it would cost, but we should get to work on cloning John von Neumann: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/

The Sustainable Development Goals - and their predecessor, the MDGs - are like a megaproject led by the UN. Some of these are already aligned with EA priorities, such as the following:

• Eradicating extreme poverty (Goal 1, Target 1.1)
• Ending hunger (Goal 2, Target 2.1) and malnutrition (Target 2.2)
  • Fortify Health aims to improve health by providing fortified wheat flour
• Good health and well-being (Goal 3)
• Clean water and sanitation (Goal 6)
• Ending energy poverty (Goal 7, Target 7.1)
  • One of the aims of the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund
• Increasing the share of renewable energy (Target 7.2) and energy efficiency (Target 7.3)
• Promoting clean energy innovation (Target 7.A)
• Decent work and economic growth (Goal 8)

The Economist has written that Goal 1 (ending poverty) should be "at the head of a very short list." In my opinion, if we're going to do a megaproject, we should take a handful of the SDG targets (such as 1.1, ending extreme poverty) and spend billions of dollars aggressively optimizing them.

An institute for the science of suffering.

You can maybe make very good civilizational refuges for 100M/year, though this is probably considerably more capital than MVPs I'd like to consider.

Funding a „serious“ prediction market.

Not sure if 100M is necessary or sufficient if you want many people or even multiple organizations to seriously work full-time on forecasting EA relevant questions. Maybe could also be used to spearhead its usage in politics.

I hope it’s ok to mention something I’d like to do at Foresight Institute:

Crowdsource + Crowdfund Civilization Tech Map

Goals: 

• Build on this map for Civilizational Self-Realization (scroll to end of article) to create an interactive technology map for positive long-term futures that is crowdsourced (Wikipedia-style) and allows crowdfunding (Kickstarter-style)
• The map surveys the ecosystem of areas relevant for civilizational long-term flourishing, from health, AI, computing, biotech, nanotech, neurotech, energy, space tech, etc.  
• The map branches out into milestones in each area, and either lists projects solving them, or requests projects to solve them, including options to fund either
• Crowdsourcing of milestones and requests for projects will get it very wrong at first but can get continuously course corrected, e.g. via prediction markets 
• Crowdfunding makes more and more people have skin in the game for the long-term future, e.g. via tokenization, retroactive public goods funding, or a similar mechanism
• In sum, the map can serve as a north star to coordinate those seeking to work toward positive futures and those seeking to fund such work.

Challenge prize(s) to incentivise the development of innovative solutions in priority areas. These could be prizes for goals already suggested by people in this thread  (e.g. producing resilient food sources, drastic changes to diagnostic testing, meat alternatives underinvested in by the market) or others. 

Quotes from a Nesta report on challenge prizes (caveat that I haven't spent any time looking up opposing evidence/perspectives):
 

By guiding and incentivising the smartest minds, prizes create more diverse solutions. Because prizes only pay out when a problem has been solved, you can support long shots, radical ideas and unusual suspects while minimising risk...

The high profile of a prize can raise public awareness and shape the future development of markets and technologies. Prizes can help identify best practice, shift regulation and drive policy change...

For the Ansari XPRIZE, 26 teams spent $100 million chasing the $10 million prize, jump starting the commercial space industry.

See also Musk's $100m prize for carbon capture tech

Buy up scarce resources which are being used for bad things and just sit on them. Like the thing where you buy rainforest to prevent logging. Coal mines, agricultural land used for animals, GPUs?!

Scaling up carbon removal and other promising climate-related technologies before governments are willing to fund them. A lot like what Stripe and Shopify have been doing, but about an order of magnitude bigger. If the timing is right (I'm not sure it is) this strategy could get a fair bit of leverage by driving costs down and accelerating even larger-scale deployments.

Launching a Nucleic Acid Observatory, as outlined recently by Kevin Esvelt and others here (link to paper). With $100m one could launch a pilot version covering 5 to 10 states in the US.

Activist investment fund which invests in large companies and then leans on them to change their policies. Examples abound in climate change, but other than that:

• Food related companies to stop factory farming
• Biotech companies to stop them from doing gain of function or mirror life research

Responding as a member of the ALLFED team.

A network of reliable, long distance shortwave radio systems that do not depend on external sources of electricity and are unable to be disabled by widespread cyber attack, EMP, or most other threats to the global communication infrastructure.

In a wide range of catastrophes, communication systems are a critical vulnerability which, if disrupted, delay societal recovery from the disaster. A highly resilient and reliable system is HAM shortwave radio, which allows reliable, low cost communication to a significant fraction of
the global population. Maintaining key high speed communication
channels during a catastrophe would greatly increase disaster resilience beyond flyer distribution, potentially at relatively little additional cost. A backup shortwave radio communication system would facilitate the timely advice on where to locate clean water sources, identify sensible relocation options, allow improved international cooperation, and allow
coordination about the nature and likely duration of the outage.

We’ve identified HAM shortwave radios as key electronic equipment that is both likely to be highly resilient to global communication disruption on large or small scales, and as relatively easy to distribute. Another interesting use for these radios is distribution to power grid stations
for use to aid blackstart communications after large scale electrical grid collapse.

While several network configurations may serve GCR reduction purposes, our preliminary network design involves around a dozen central stations receiving and broadcasting globally, a network of several hundred two-way NVIS transceiver networks operated by trained personnel, and a few
thousand distributed receiver-only radios. The network would utilize SSB communications to lower power requirements. To cover the entire earth’s population we estimate the total construction and shipping cost at between USD $2 million and $10 million, scaling roughly proportionally with the fraction of global population able to be reached by the network. 

Total costs would therefore reasonably reach into the tens to hundreds of millions for this sort of mega project, depending on the spatial density of the network.

Announce $100M/year in prizes for AI interpretability/transparency research. Explicitly state that the metric is "How much closer does this research take us towards, one day when we build human-level AGI, being able to read said AI's mind, understand what it is thinking and why, what its goals and desires are, etc., ideally in an automated way that doesn't involve millions of person-hours?"
(Could possibly do it as NFTs, like my other suggestion.)

I don't know the area well, but I guess that one option would be to invest in relevant AI companies, to be able to influence their decision-making (and it could also be profitable). I guess that one could in principle invest very large sums in that. And unlike some other suggested projects, it is maybe not necessarily logistically complicated (though it depends on the set-up). Cf. Ryan's comment.

Proof of concept for a geoengineering scheme (could be controversial)

9 PACs have raised/spent more than $100m (source). So an EA PAC?

Although I guess Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest donor to Biden (coindesk, Vox), and Dustin Moskovitz gave $50m; and they're both involved with Future Forward and Mind The Gap, so maybe EA is already kinda doing this.

Create global distributed governments.

Governments as they exist today seem antiquated to me as they are linked to particular geographic regions, and the particular shapes and locations of those regions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Meanwhile some governments are good at providing for their people – social security, health insurance, enforcement of contracts, physical protection, etc. – so that’s fine, but there are also a lot of governments that are weak in one or more of these critically important departments.

If there were a market of competing global governments, we’d get labor mobility without anyone actually having to move. The governments that provide the best services for the cheapest prices would attract the most citizens.

These governments could draw on something like Robin Hanson’s proposal for a reform of tort law to incentivize a market for crime prevention, could use proof of stake (where the stake may be a one-time payment that the government holds in escrow or a promise of a universal basic income to law-abiding citizens) for some legal matters, and could use futarchy for legislation.

They could also provide physical services, such as horizontal health interventions and physical protection in countries where they can collaborate with the local governments.

An immediate benefit would be the reduction of poverty and disease, but they could also serve to unlock a lot of intellectual capacity by giving people the spare time to educate themselves on matters other than survival. They could define protocols for resolving conflicts between countries and lock in incentives to ensure that the protocols are adhered to. (I bet smart contracts can help with this.)

That way, they could form a union of autonomous parts sort of like the cantons of Switzerland. Such a union of global distributed governments could eventually become a de-facto world government, which may be beneficial for existential security and for enabling the Long Reflection.

Such a government could be bootstrapped out of the EA community. A nonpublic web of trust could form the foundation of the first citizens. If the system fails even when the citizenry is made up largely of highly altruistic, conscientious people who can pay taxes and share a similar culture, it’s probably not ready for the real world. But if it proves to be valuable, it can be gradually scaled up to a broader population spanning more different cultures.

As I alluded to in a comment to KHorton's related post, I believe SoGive could grow to spend something like this much money.

SoGive's core idea is to provide EA style analysis, but covering a much more comprehensive range of charities than the charities currently assessed by EA charity evaluators.

As mentioned there, benefits of this include:

• SoGive could have a broader appeal because we would be useful to so many more people; it could conceivably achieve the level of brand recognition achieved by charity evaluators such as Charity Navigator, which have high levels of brand recognition in the US (c50% with a bit of rounding).
• Lots of the impact here is the illegible impact that comes from being well-known and highly influential; this could lead to more major donors being attracted to EA-style donating, or many other things.
• There's also the impact that could come from donating to higher impact things within a lower impact cause area, and the impact of influencing the charity sector to have more impact

Full disclosure: I founded SoGive.

This short comment is not sufficient to make the case for SoGive, so I should probably right up something more substantial.

The Human Diagnosis Project (disclaimer: I currently work there). If successful, it will be a major step toward accurate medical diagnosis for all of humanity.

Creating a new academic institute - the EA university - that houses a lot of EA research and (somehow) avoids the many issues seen in traditional academia.