Master Chief

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the implications of a world where general-purpose robots are developed before AGI. (In such a world, I imagine, trillions of robots would permeate society, replace factory workers, work in homes, etc.) One implication could be increased AI takeover risk. Intuitively, widespread robots might make takeover...

Note: I am referring only to technical biosecurity in this post, i.e. engineering, not policy roles. I’m an engineering undergrad thinking about contributing to the engineering side of biosecurity as a career —things like developing better disease sensors and bioaerosol monitoring systems (and other work that is not molecular biology-heavy)....

One potential risk of developing general-purpose robots is that they could greatly reduce the friction required to establish a totalitarian regime. If robots became physically capable of manufacturing additional copies of themselves, a small group of bad actors could potentially manufacture millions of general-purpose robots and use them to establish...

Hi all, mechanical + electrical engineering undergraduate who enjoys research and hopes to pursue a career in it. While I’m not especially interested in the main EA cause areas (AI safety, biosecurity, cybersecurity, etc.), I’d still like my research to have as much impact as possible. Does anyone know of...

Engineering + math graduate whose goal is to maximize impact. I am currently deciding between two career paths, but have been struggling a lot to determine which would be more impactful: 1. Become a professor/researcher in robotics, working on mainstream technical problems such as zero-shot learning. (To be clear, I’m...

(For context, I’m an undergraduate considering entering the hard-tech startup space. One concern I have is whether some of these startups are highly inevitable, and therefore whether my marginal impact as a founder would be essentially negligible.) Question: For many hard-tech startups that do not require extremely sophisticated technology, if...

One potential risk of developing general-purpose robots is that they could greatly reduce the friction required to establish a totalitarian regime. If there were millions+ of general-purpose robots deployed in the world (in households, nursing homes, construction sites, etc.), and someone were able to hack / take control of a...