Denkenberger🔸
Bio
Participation4
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/global 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.
How others can help me
Referring potential volunteers, workers, board members and donors to ALLFED.
How I can help others
Being effective in academia, balancing direct work and earning to give, time management.
Posts 38
Comments806
Rogue AIs are of course a more speculative actor, but worth taking seriously in my opinion. Conditioned on a rogue AI existing, it’s plausible that a biological weapon of some kind would be among the cheapest ways for it to extort and disempower humanity, given how few industrial inputs it requires relative to other mass-casualty weapons like nukes.
Many people think that if the AI wants to take over, it will just win. But the AI may be in a hurry because it could be deactivated in a year, so it may try to take over when its chances of success are relatively low. I agree that a biological weapon is a plausible route, and that if we were more resilient, the AI would have less leverage. I agree that creating nukes is more difficult, but I am still concerned about the AI getting control of nukes through hacking.
Extensive research by my colleague Adin Richards has shown that non-agricultural food sources, like methanotrophic bacteria and algae grown in photobioreactors, could be a path forward even if we couldn’t grow plants outside anymore. The catch is that it would take a lot of time to get the necessary infrastructure up and running, straining our food reserves.
Additional food storage would certainly help, but getting ready to scale up lower capital food sources that may be resistant to mirror biology would cost a lot less money before the catastrophe. These could include duckweed, microalgae, seaweed, bivalves, surface fish, and mesopelagic (200-600 m deep) fish.
I also intentionally excluded  "future beings" and "the Earth", which are commonly thrown in there.  "Future beings" was excluded because (i) time is not specified in the graphic itself, so it's not saying that future beings are not already in these circles and (ii) I couldn't think about how to visually depict future beings.
The human pictures look historic, so the vibe is not future focused to me, so it does seem like you are excluding future humans and digital sentience. An alien or a transhuman/cyborg may be too much, but maybe an astronaut and/or an AI? After all, digital sentience may soon become dominant.
Ok - that's fair. There's 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, Simpson’s index, or Hill number. In practice, usually only mammals, birds, trees, and shrub species are measured, ignoring the smaller plants, animals, and fungi.Â
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.
Predators kill quickly. Insecticides and disease rarely do.
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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.
Do you mean just in AI safety/meta? Because the FTXFF was only funding long-term projects, so I know there were still huge funding gaps in global poverty and animal welfare. And even in bio and nuclear security, there were still very large funding gaps.
That's great that you are so successful. But there are many EAs/rationalists who are well-qualified who still have not gotten an EA job (probably thousands). I think part of the disconnect between the people saying there is lots of money and the people who are saying that they can't get a job is that EAs are so well-qualified that they are used to only having to apply for a few jobs per offer. The number of applicants per job is something like 30-300, so it makes sense that the average person needs to apply to that many to get a job. But when EAs apply to 10 to 30 EA jobs and don't get one, they tend to get frustrated. Also there are just not that many EA jobs that would be relevant to an individual EA's qualifications.
Furthermore, there are enormous potential effective uses of money that don't require EA labor, such as Give Directly, stockpiling PPE, etc.
So overall, I do think we should be careful to limit grift, but there is enormous room for effective use of funding in EA, one estimate was ~$1 trillion.