EA - Retrospective on recent activity of Riesgos Catastróficos Globales by Jaime Sevilla

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Retrospective on recent activity of Riesgos Catastróficos Globales, published by Jaime Sevilla on May 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The new team of Riesgos Catastróficos Globales started their job two months ago.During this time, they have been working on two reports on what we have identified as top priorities for the management of Global Catastrophic Risks from Spanish-Speaking countries: food security during Abrupt Sunlight-Reduction Scenarios (e.g. nuclear winter) and AI regulation.In this article, I will cover their output in more depth and future plans, with some reflections on how the project is going.The short version is that I am reasonably pleased, and the directive board has decided to continue the project for two more months. The team's productivity has exceeded my expectations, though I see opportunities for improvement in our quality assurance, formation and outreach. We remain short of funding; if you want to support our work you can donate through our donation portal.Intellectual outputIn the last two months, the team has been working on two major reports and several minor outputs.1) Report on food security in Argentina during abrupt sun-reducing scenarios (ASRS), in collaboration with ALLFED. In this report, we explain the important role Argentina could have during ASRS to mitigate global famine. We sketch several policies that would be useful inclusions in an emergency plan, such as resilient food deployment, together with suggestions on which public organisms could implement them.2) Report on AI regulation for the EU AI Act Spanish sandbox (forthcoming). We are interviewing and eliciting opinions from several experts, to compile an overview of AI risk for Spanish policymakers and proposals to make the most out of the upcoming EU AI sandbox.3) An article about AI regulation in Spain. In this short article, we explain the relevance of Spain for AI regulation in the context of the EU AI Act. We propose four policies that could be tested in the upcoming sandbox. It serves as a preview of the report I mentioned above.4) An article about the new GCR mitigation law in USA, reporting on its meaning and proposing similar initiatives for Spanish-Speaking countries.5) Two statements about Our Common Agenda Policy Briefs, in collaboration with the Simon Institute.Overall, I think we have done a good job of contextualizing the research done in the international GCR community. However, I feel we rely a lot on the involvement of the direction board for quality assurance, and our limited time means that some mistakes and misconceptions will likely have made it to publication.Having said that, I am pleased with the results. The team has been amazingly productive, publishing a 60-page report in two months and several minor publications alongside it.In the future, we will be involving more experts for a more thorough review process. This also means that we will be erring towards producing shorter reports, which can be more thoroughly checked and are better for engaging policy-makers.FormationEarly in the project, we identified the education of our staff as a key challenge to overcome. Our staff has work experience and credentials, but their exposure to the GCR literature was limited.We undertook several activities to address this lack of formation:Knowledge transfer talks with Spanish-speaking experts from our directive board and advisory network (Juan García from ALLFED, Jaime Sevilla from Epoch, Clarissa Rios Rojas from CSER).A GCR reading group with curated reading recommendations.An online course taught by Sandra Malagón from Carreras con Impacto.A dedicated course on the basics of Machine Learning.I am satisfied with the results, and I see a clear progression in the team. In hindsight, I think we erred on the side of too much form...