A bill to massively expand NSF to tech domains. What's the relevance for x-risk?

By EdoArad @ 2020-07-12T15:20 (+22)

A new bill suggested for a massive increase in funding ($100B increase over 4 years, against the current $35B) to the NSF (National Science Foundation), allocated to technological progress in 10 areas, including Natural or Anthropogenic Disaster Prevention. Can this be leveraged to massively increased attention and resources to x-risk?

RyanCarey @ 2020-07-13T13:00 (+7)

A big expansion of the non-defence science budget, $8B/yr->$30B+/yr, with ML/genomics/disaster prevention being among the focus areas for the additional funding - interesting! Yet less than federal national defence spending ($60B/yr)., and much less than private R&D ($400B/yr). [1]

I guess groups that are already using defence research grants (maybe AI research) or private funding would be affected to a small-to-medium extent, whereas ones that are not (disaster prevention) could feel a big difference.

1. See Fig 3 and Table 1 at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf

EdoArad @ 2020-07-12T15:20 (+5)

The bill also aims at building a DARPA-like funding institution within NSF.

I'm quite excited by this. Anyone has more information about it?

Linch @ 2020-07-13T04:49 (+2)

"Natural or Anthropogenic Disaster Prevention" self-links. Is this intentional?

EdoArad @ 2020-07-13T05:59 (+2)

Nope 😊 Fixed, thanks!