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Whilst the LEDs are not around the corner, I think the Kr-Cl excimer lamps might already be good enough.

When we wrote the original post on this, it was not clear how quickly covid was spreading through the air, but I think it is now clear that covid can hang around for a long time (on the order of minutes or hours rather than seconds) and still infect people.

It seems that a power density of 0.25W/m^2 would probably be enough to sterilize air in 1-2 minutes, meaning that a 5m x 8m room would need a 10W source. Assuming 2% efficiency that 10W source needs 500W electrical, which is certainly possible and in the days of incandescent lights you would have had a few 100W bulbs anyway.

EDIT: Having looked into this a bit more, it seems that right now the low efficiency of excimer lamps is not a binding constraint because the legally allowed far-UVC exposure is so low.

"TLV exposure limit for 222 nm (23 mJ cm^−2)"

23 mJ per cm^2 per day is just 0.002 W/m^2 , so you really don't need much power until you hit legal limitations.

Source

I think this doesn't make sense any more now that veganism is such a popular and influential movement that influences government policy and has huge control over culture.

But a slightly different version of this is that because there's no signalling value in a collective decision to impose welfare standards, it's very hard to turn into a political movement. So we may be looking at a heavily constrained system.

You're correct, that is a mistake. It's $6.50 per kg, I forgot to convert.

Yes, I didn't address that here. But I think anyone who is vegan for nonsignalling reasons is sort of mistaken.

There may be no animal welfare gain to veganism

I remain unconvinced that there is any animal welfare gain to vegi/veganism, farm animals have a strong desire to exist and if we stopped eating them they would stop existing.

Vegi/veganism exists for reasons of signalling, it would be surprising if it had any large net benefits other than signalling.

On top of this, the cost to mitigate most of the aspects of farming that animals disprefer is likely vastly smaller than the harms to human health.

Back of the envelope calculation is that making farming highly preferable to nonexistence for beef cattle raises the price by 25%-50%. I have some sources that ethically raised beef cattle has a cost of production of slightly more than $4.17/lb. Chicken has an ethical cost of production that's $2.64/lb vs $0.87/lb (from the same source). But, taking into account various ethics-independent overheads the consumer will not see those prices. Like, I cannot buy chicken for $0.87/lb, I pay about $3.25/lb. So I suspect that the true difference that the consumer would see is in the 25%-50% range. The same source above gives a smaller gap for pork - $6.76/lb vs $5.28/lb.

So, we could pay about 33% more for ethical meat that gives animals lives that are definitely preferable to nonexistence. The average consumer apparently spends about $1000/year on meat. So, that's about 70 years * $333 = $23,000

Now, if we conservatively assume that vegi/veganism costs say 2 years of life expectancy adjusted for quality due to nutritional deficiencies (ignore the pleasure of eating meat here, and also ignoring the value to the animals of their own lives) - with a statistical value of life of $10 million that's a cost of about $300,000.

If we value animal lives at say k% of a human life per unit time, and for simplicity assume that a person eats only $1000 of beef per year ~= 200 lb ~= 1/2 a cow, then each person causes the existence of about 0.75 cows on a permanent basis, each living for about 18 months, which is valued at 0.75k%.$10M. Vegans do not usually give an explicit value for k. Is an animal life worth the same as a human life per year? 1/10th? 1/20th? 1/100th? In any case, it doesn't really matter what you pick for this, it's overdetermined here.

So, veganism fails cost-benefit analysis based on these assumptions, compared to the option of just paying a bit extra for farming techniques that are more preferable to animals at an acceptably elevated cost.

Of course you could argue that veganism is good for human health, but I believe that is wrong due to bias and confounding (there are many similar screwups where a confounding effect due to something being popular with the upper class swamps a causal effect in the other direction). There are, as far as I am aware, no good RCTs on veganism.

In summary, veganism is a signalling game that fails rational cost-benefit analysis.

It strikes me that for a successful startup you ideally want to think big and raise a lot of money. Small efforts are inefficient and the VC community understand that there is a certain minimal scale to getting returns.

We decided to restrict nuclear power

This is enforced by the USA though, and the USA is a nuclear power with global reach.

I don't see any better alternative

I do! Aligned benevolent AI!

the best - IMO the only - option to prevent earth from getting destroyed immediately is to make it absolutely clear to everyone that creating a black hole is suicidal.

I am pretty sure you are just wrong about this and there are people who will gladly pay $10M to end the world, or they would use it as a blackmail threat and a threat ignorer would meet a credible threatener, etc.

People are a bunch of unruly, dumb barely-evolved monkeys and the left tail of human stupidity and evil would blow your mind.

as we can always decide not to develop it

If you really think that through in the long-term it means a permanent ban on compute that takes computers back to the level they were in the 1970s, and a global enforcement system to keep it that way.

Furthermore, there are implications for space colonization: if any group can blast away from the SOL system and colonize a different solar system, they can make an ASI there and it can come back and kill us all. Similarly, it means any development on other planets must be monitored for violations of the compute limit, and we must also monitor technology that would indirectly lead to a violation of the limits on compute, i.e. any technology that would allow people to build an advanced modern chip fab without the enforcers detecting it.

In short, you are trying to impose an equilibrium which is not incentive compatible - every agent with sufficient power to build ASI has an incentive to do so for purely instrumental reasons. So, long-term the only way to not build misaligned, dangerous ASI is build an aligned ASI.

However that is a long-term problem. In the short term there are a very limited number of groups who can build it so they can probably coordinate.

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