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 40
Comments861
There's also the question of how realistic it is to found a charity. I think most EAs think that it's too hard to get an EA job, let alone start an EA charity. However, I know of five people who were unsuccessful getting EA jobs, who instead founded successful EA-aligned charities. Now those people were generally not fresh college grads, but it still could be more realistic than many think.
The long reflection or the long self correction seem to mainly be about thinking. But I think it would be better to try things out before expanding outside the solar system. Instead of giving everyone one 10 billionth of the lightcone right away, maybe increase their resources an order of magnitude (OOM), and evaluate what happens. Then another OOM, and you would have another ~7 steps before you get to their share of the Dyson Swarm. Then you would have a much better idea of the failure modes you would need to guard against when distances get large between stars/galaxies.
Compared to the reward hacks we know of from just six months ago, this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover.
That's scary. What do you think the mechanism would be? Here are some options:
- Superhuman nanotech
- Superhuman strategy persuasion
- Escapes and coordinates with a copy inside, builds independent industrial base, so then can kill humans (not superhuman)
- Humans give the AIs everything they need, AIs do good stuff, later take over, or just lie to us about what they are going to do with the universe and Earth is fine
- Sudden robot coup
- Threatening or releasing biological agent
- Threatening or launching nukes
It seems like most of these options would not be available in the next 6 months.
I think the key thing to test is when plant based substitutes are significantly cheaper than animal products. The two examples I know of now are margarine and egg replacer. The former got big market penetration (and I think some actual substitution) and the latter didn't. As I've argued elsewhere, we could get plant based burgers to cost parity or better if we built a bigger factory. Then I think there would be some substitution for price sensitive consumers.
What do you think about AI 2040's idea of giving all people an equal slice of the lightcone and allow them to sell theirs? The endowment would extremely roughly give everyone a cut of the Dyson swarm the size of the earth, a star in the Milky Way, and a galaxy. But since the star would typically take thousands of years to reach, it might be better to allow people to sell their galaxy, star, and slice of the Dyson swarm separately. Then the people who value the long-term future could buy most of the stars and galaxies.
Yes, there are many tens of billions of dollars that could be used fairly effectively.