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.
denkenberger
I don’t know how employment would play out. If there were an automated Junior AI researcher, then senior AI researchers could plausibly manage 10 of them each (like now) and they may lay off the Junior AI researchers if they can’t manage the automated Junior AI researchers. That would save the AI companies money, but would not really get them more research done. The total potential is millions of automated researchers, so maybe it would be possible for one human to manage 1000 automated researchers? Anyway, it seems to me that at some point, there would be mass layoffs, in which case the workers could argue that they could pivot to safety.
As for whether it is much harder to enforce if there are automated AI researchers, I don’t know. It seems like regardless, they could prohibit training of new more capable models, but I guess the labs might argue they need to train a new safer model? But that blurriness would be the case regardless of whether the researchers are human or AI. Are you saying that it’s harder to enforce a pause if progress is faster or cheaper?
There are now ‘closed loop systems’ that allow data centers to only draw water once.
But they use more energy because they don’t get the evaporative cooling to reduce the strain on the chiller (or potentially obviate the chiller).
But perhaps instead of shutting down, an AI company could reallocate 100% of its budget on some combination of safety research + global coordination to make AI development safer, and do just those things until it runs out of money. Think of how much more safety work a they could do if they dedicated all their resources to the problem!
A lot of people think we should pause at AGI, but one problem is that AI capabilities are spiky, so we will probably get powerful and dangerous capabilities even before it is human level at all tasks. So I was thinking what might actually be politically/economically feasible is pausing further development once they get an automated AI researcher, because all those AI capability researchers are not going to be happy about being laid off. So we could turn them into AI safety researchers!
So what is a mercury to lead problem?
I think that The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists claims 7 hours on average of interaction. But in the olden days, you were only supposed to date every week, so that could easily turn into weeks depending on the person.
One student, upon being told that most of the mass in the wood comes from and not the dirt in the ground, said “that’s very disturbing and I wonder how that could happen.” And that’s an MIT graduate.
Yes, and some Harvard grads thought the seasons were caused by varying distance between the Earth and the Sun. However, this source was 1987, and judging by the VHS cassette in yours, it was probably also old. So I suspect that there would greater awareness now with climate change that trees soak up CO2, and that both unis have made more of an effort to have their students know things like this because of the bad press. Also, I expect that there was some cherry-picking. However, I agree with your overall point that many well educated people don’t know basic facts about the world.
massive societal collapse (no food)
What do you think the AI would do that would cause the societal collapse?
Opening the Overton window would be great, but even endorsements of mainstream famous people like Larry King, Seth MacFarlane, Simon Cowell, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears hasn’t seemed to help much.
Similarly, I have now said my peace about this. Violence is never the answer,
I’m not sure if it was intentional, but I appreciate the pun on saying your piece.
How many people exist who will be willing to buy at that price? Well, there are about 24 million people in the USA with a net worth of over a million dollars — about 40% of the millionaires, worldwide. As a back-of-the-envelope, order-of-magnitude guess, let’s say that there are about 50 million people who could reasonably afford Nectome’s services, that about 2% of these people die each year, and that half of those do so in a way that’s compatible with going to Oregon and getting MAiD — 500k potential clients per year. Even if only one-in-a-thousand people are open to it, philosophically, Nectome really could potentially be serving hundreds of clients per year, if they get really good at marketing. And, if they break the Overton window open, thousands per year is plausible.
I’ve run calculations like this before, and have thought, “Why are there not more cryonicists?” I think the sad reality is that many people who “should” be interested in it just have all sorts of rationalizations for their initial impression that it is weird or unnatural or could be worse than death. So I think your prior should be the rate of people already signing up for cryonics, and argue why Nectome is different. For the average person who might be interested, I don’t think it’s that different. That said, since you can fund this from life insurance with an early payout, I think it’s more affordable to people than your calculation suggests.
Somewhat related: Hanson argues in Age of Em there would be hundreds of unique ems to cover all the jobs, and they would all have a lot of training. But that is for peak performance.
Here’s a paper with islands as a natural experiments providing evidence that colonialism increased the well-being of poor countries.
I didn’t have the patience to jailbreak the scatological refusal of an LLM to produce an image of “elicit paradigm-shiting research work out of the AIs”, but someone else might want to.
It’s not both of these problems—either you do whole body cryopreservation (no decapitation) and no body at the funeral at all, or you do neuro preservation and you can have the rest of the body cremated and present at the funeral.
compatible with normal funerals, so dramatically lower spending of weirdness points and religious objections. I think this means it can scale about 2oom more than cryo at least.
I couldn’t quickly find the percentage of open casket funerals, but let’s say it is half. If we take the extreme case that right now cryonics is only adopted by people with families who would prefer a non-open casket funeral, then maybe that doubles the market? I think the main religious objections are that you are playing God, the soul doesn’t go back into the body, etc. Also, the MAiD requirement would cause a lot more religious objection. And in reality, many cryonicists sign up even if their relatives would prefer open casket. So I think the market would increase less than 100%, let alone 10,000% due to these factors.
Or “We’re All Medieval Kings.” More accurate but not quite on point. If you look at the human development index, a composite of life expectancy, education, and income, even people significantly below developed country poverty lines would be on par with medieval kings.
In New Zealand, many meat patties are cooked only on the outside, and one of the recommended methods of cooking is a microwave—I never saw that in the US.
Quick polls on AGI doom
With some space freed by classic alignment worries, we can focus on the world’s actual biggest problems. My top candidates (in no particular order):
What about nuclear war? I think a pre-emptive strike is plausible if one country may get power over the world with aligned AI.
I was saying for the case if managers could still only manage the same number of equivalent people. I agree that they would figure out how to manage more, but do you think they could each manage 1000 equivalent junior AI researchers?
Ok—faster makes more sense. But we have seen with Fable that policy-makers can act fast if they want to. Labs would probably want to use the compute to go for ASI, but they could still make a lot of money if customers paid for the compute (though of course they would need to reserve some compute to support the human AI safety researchers).