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 152 publications (>5100 citations, >60,000 downloads, h-index = 36, 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, 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’m glad my suggestion was helpful!
(I continue to be quite unsure how to think about saving for retirement and kids college.)
In normal worlds, I think you are in excellent shape, with how your greater than $2 million net worth compares to median of around $100,000 and mean of around $800,000 net worth for households in their 40s in the US. Also, I think you have greater net worth than more than 99% of households in the world. If you let your taxable account go to zero, then you would likely have to pay less for college, because often the retirement accounts are not included in those calculations. If you didn’t add anything more to your retirement account and it just grew 8% per year for twenty years, you would have ~$4 million. Then with the rule of thumb of drawing 4% per year during retirement, you would have an annual income of ~$160k. And that would not be counting any Social Security, income from home downsizing, inheritance, etc.
As for AGI worlds, as many have pointed out, we could be all dead or all rich, so it wouldn’t matter. One person pointed out that wealth at the singularity might allow you to buy galaxies, but at least if you’re altruistic, the impact of reducing existential risk is many orders of magnitude greater. Others have pointed out that even if humanity on average is rich, there may not be UBI. As long as one has significant net worth, this should grow at least initially, and then the cost of living should fall, so you should be fine. However, for people without any net worth, especially outside countries that benefit a lot from AI, there is reason to be worried. I personally think that even if there is not universal UBI, the rich of the world would not allow the poor to starve en masse. But if you want to do better than just not starving, then having a modest amount of net worth I think is quite prudent.
I think the probability of nuclear war in the next 10 years is around 15%. This is mostly due to the extreme tensions that will occur during takeoff by default. Finding ways to avoid nuclear war is important.
Or resilience to nuclear war. What’s your probability of an engineered pandemic in the next 10 years?
I think a more accurate way to model them is “GiveWell recommends organizations that are [within the Overton Window]/[have very sound data to back impact estimates] that save as many current lives as possible.” If GiveWell wanted to recommend organizations that save as many human lives as possible, their portfolio would probably be entirely made up of AI safety orgs.
Sounds about right—this paper used an older AI Safety model to find $16 to $12,000 per life saved in the present generation. Though I think some other GCR interventions could also compete on that metric, such as neglected work on engineered pandemics, and resilience to food catastrophes.
The key benefit that’s missing and might have sold me on it, given Sasha Cohen wrote this, is that this doesn’t let you marry your own Cate Hall.
I think you mean Sasha Chapin. But thinking that it was Sacha Baron Cohen did get me to click on the link.
Then recently we have the example where an 11-year-old (!) walked less than a mile into a 370-person town, and the mother was charged with reckless conduct and forced to sign a ‘safety plan’ on pain of jail time pledging to track him at all times via an app on his phone.
Though there was some pushback that the mother did not know where the kid was, this still seems confusing given rules around school commutes. Many schools do not provide bus service within half a mile up the school, expecting kids to walk or bicycle. In Alaska, it was 1.5 miles even though it got down to −40°! And there generally does not appear to be an age limit where parents are required to go with their kids, so it sounds like it’s okay for a 5-year-old to do this.
For something in the range of $10M/y we think you can operate a system capable of detecting a novel pathogen before 1:1000 people have been infected.
Sounds promising! I assume this is for one location, so have you done any modeling or estimations of what the global prevalence would be at that point? If you get lucky, it could be very low. But it also could be a lot higher if you get unlucky.
Have you done any cost-effectiveness analyses? Do you think that many people would be willing to take actions to reduce transmission etc in a case where no one has gotten sick yet?
Ground shipping is both a complement and a substitute for water shipping, so the net effect isn’t obvious. (Or at least, it’s not obvious to me).
Since overall freight moved wouldn’t change that much (see my comment in this thread), the main economic efficiency of repeal is obtained by using ships instead of ground transport, because ships are cheaper. So overall, ships must be a substitute for ground transport. However, it’s possible that some routes would be nearly all rail right now, and if it switched to primarily ships, there may be some additional trucking involved because it’s not worth putting on a train for a relatively short distance. Have you looked at any studies examining effects on different modes (I haven’t)? If repealing the Jones Act actually did increase trucking, then it could be positive for overall employment as the labour intensity of trucking is so much higher than the other modes.
Also, if a certain interest group has not lobbied in a policy area in the past (as I think is the case here?), then that’s nonzero evidence that they will continue to not lobby in that policy area in the future.
It does look like ground transport has not lobbied, which is surprising to me, but I agree it does provide evidence that they will continue to not lobby.
Since I couldn’t find it quickly on the web, GPT o1 estimated that the labour hours per ton kilometer of trucking is about 100 times as much as ships, and rail is just about the same as ships (I would have thought rail would have been at least a few times higher than ships). So based on the historic US and current Europe, maybe water transport in the US would increase an order of magnitude if the Jones act were repealed. As Zvi points out, even though the US ship manufacturing jobs would be lost, there probably would be an increase overall shipping employment because of repairing ships and staffing ships. So let’s say staffing the ships is 3 times as much as the current employment of manufacturing and staffing very few ships. I suspect that most of the lost inland transportation due to the shift from shipping would be rail, but even if 10% of it were trucking, that would mean the loss of jobs in trucking would be 10 times as much as the staffing of the additional ships, and 30 times as much as the employment constructing and staffing the current ships.[1] So if you had to compensate 30 times as many people, it would be much more difficult. Now it is true that the majority of total cost of rail and shipping is energy (it’s about even between energy and labour for trucking), so the large overall economic savings of moving to shipping should be sufficient to compensate all those truckers, but it’s just not nearly the slamdunk that it appeared to be when only looking at marine employment.
- ^
Technically not all the freight that would be moved by ships is currently moved by truck/rail/pipeline because a smaller amount gets transported because of the higher cost. But using Zvi’s example of $0.63 per barrel increase, since it is 42 gallons per barrel, that’s 1.5 cents/gallon, or ~0.5% of the total cost, which wouldn’t change quantity demanded very much, well within other uncertainties of this analysis.
- ^
The thing is, there really are not all that many of them. Even if you counted every job at every shipyard, and every job aboard every Jones Act ship, and assumed all of them would be completely lost, it simply is not that many union workers.
But the Jones Act is massively benefiting truck and rail staff (and to some extent, pipelines), so I think there are a lot more workers you would need to compensate. Also, I would expect the truck and rail lobbies to try to save the Jones Act.
It would be helpful to see a calculation with your rates, the installed cost of batteries, cost of the space taken up, losses in the batteries and convertor, any cost of maintenance, lifetime of batteries, and cost (or benefit) of disposal.
If you have 3 days worth of storage, even if you completely discharge it in 3 days and completely charge it in the next 3 days, you would only go through about 60 cycles per year. In reality, you might get 10 full cycles per year. With interest rates and per year depreciation, typically you would only look out around 10 years, so you might get ~100 discounted full cycles. That’s why it makes more sense to calculate it based on capital cost as I have done above. If you’re interested in digging deeper, you can get free off grid modeling software, such as the original version of HOMER (new versions you have to pay).
Even now at $1000/kW-hr retail it’s almost cost-effective here to buy batteries to time-shift energy from solar generation to time of consumption. At $700/kW-hr it would definitely be cost-effective to do daily load-shifting with the grid as a backup only for heavily cloudy days.
Please write out the calculation.
Have there been some recent advances in compressed air energy storage? The information I read 2-3 years ago did not look promising at any scale.
Aboveground compressed air energy storage (tanks) is a little cheaper than chemical batteries. But belowground large compressed air energy storage is much cheaper for days of storage, with estimates around $1 to $10 per kilowatt hour. Current large installations are in particularly favorable geology, but we already store huge amounts of natural gas seasonally in saline aquifers. So we can basically do the same thing with compressed air, though the cycling needs to be more frequent.
That does sound like an excessive markup. But my point is even with the wholesale price, chemical batteries are nowhere near cost-effective for medium-term (days) electrical storage. Instead we should be doing pumped hydropower, compressed air energy storage, or building thermal energy storage (and eventually some utilization of vehicle battery storage because the battery is already paid for for the transport function). I talk about this more in my second 80k podcast.
Yes, but the rest of my comment focused on why I don’t think defection from just the electric grid is close to economical with the same reliability.
But with what reliability? If you don’t mind going without power (or dramatically curtailed power) a few weeks a year, then you could dramatically reduce the battery size, but most people in high income countries don’t want to make that trade-off.
And so are batteries.
Lithium-ion batteries have gotten a lot cheaper, but batteries in general have not. Lithium ion are just now starting to become competitive with lead acid for non-mobile applications. It’s not clear that batteries in general will get significantly cheaper.
It’s going to make sense for a lot of houses to go over to solar + batteries. And if batteries are too expensive for the longest stretch of cloudy days you might have, at least here a natural gas generator compares favorably.
In your climate, defection from the natural gas and electric grid is very far from being economical, because the peak energy demand for the year is dominated by heating, and solar peaks in the summer, so you would need to have extreme oversizing of the panels to provide sufficient energy in the winter. But if you have a climate that has a good match between solar output and energy demand, it gets better (or if you only defect from the electric grid). Still, even if batteries got 3 times cheaper to say $60 per kilowatt hour, and you needed to store 3 days of electricity, that would be about $4300 per kilowatt capital cost, which is much more expensive than large gas power plants + electrical transmission and distribution. Another big issue is that reliability would not be as high as with the central grid in developed countries (though it very well could be more reliable than the grid in a low income country).
While a power station could be up to 63% efficient, for a home generator maybe I’m looking at something like the 23% efficient Generac 7171, rated for 9kW on natural gas at full load. Or maybe something smaller, since this is probably in addition to batteries and only has to match the house’s average consumption. This turns my $0.06kWh into $0.24/kWh, plus the cost of the generator and maintenance.
Yes, you would only want around 1 kW electrical, especially because the only hope to make this economical when you count the capital cost and maintenance is to utilize a lot of the waste heat (cogeneration), ideally both for heating and for cooling (through an absorption cycle, trigeneration). But though I don’t think it works economically for a household (even in your favorable case of low natural gas prices and high electricity prices), you can have an economical cogeneration/trigeneration installation for a large apartment building, and certainly for college campuses.
Stress during the day takes years off people’s lives. Is there any evidence that stress during dreams (not necessarily nightmares) has a similar effect? Then that could be a significant benefit of lucid dreaming to reduce stress.
So this seems like very strong evidence for 2%+ productivity growth already from AI, which should similarly raise GDP.
If you actually take all the reports here seriously and extrapolate average gains, you get a lot more than 2%. Davidad estimates 8% in general.
The labour fraction of GDP is about 60% in the US now, and not all labour is cognitive tasks, and not all cognitive tasks have immediate payoff. Furthermore, people could use the time savings to work fewer hours, rather than get more done. So I would guess the productivity in cognitive tasks should be divided by something like 4 to get actual increase in GDP.
Asking an ASI to leave a hole in a Dyson Shell, so that Earth could get some sunlight not transformed to infrared, would cost It 4.5e-10 of Its income.
Interestingly, if the ASI did this, Earth would still be in trouble because it would get the same amount of solar radiation, but the default would be also receiving a similar amount of infrared from the Dyson swarm. Perhaps the infrared could be directed away from the earth, or perhaps an infrared shield could be placed above the earth or some other radiation management system could be implemented. Similarly, even if the Dyson swarm were outside the earth’s orbit, Earth would also default get a lot of infrared from the Dyson swarm. Still, it would not cost the ASI very much more of its income to actually spare Earth.
Why does the chart not include energy? Prepared meals in grocery stores cost more, so their increased prevalence would be part of the explanation. Also, grains got more expensive in the last 20 years partly due to increased use in biofuels.
Humans design lots of things that are less complex than butterflies and bacteria by your definition, like shovels. I would guess that the wax motor and control system that locks and unlocks your washing machine has a lower complexity than the bacteria in your example.