#107 - Anthropic Investment, Feminism in China, and Opportunities for Bioengineers
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In the News
🌍 The Principles for Responsible Investment have evaluated hundreds of policies that are either in effect or going to take effect between now and 2050, and their estimates put peak warming at 1.8 degrees.
🌋 Promising evidence suggests that geothermal energy storage could be cost-competitive with lithium-ion batteries.
☄️ NASA’s mission to extract material from an asteroid has proven successful, paving the way towards a deeper understanding of our solar system and the potential for asteroid mining.
💰 Amazon is investing up to $4B in Anthropic
Opportunities
The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) is a rapidly growing institute within the Dean of Research. As an independent research institute, HAI’s mission is to advance AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition. They are currently seeking a policy program manager to provide support for their ops and research.
BioFlyte is introducing a revolutionary and disruptive new class of fieldable bio-threat sampling, detection, and identification solutions to significantly counter bioterrorism and other biohazards to save lives and protect business operations at the point-of-need. Their current focus is critical infrastructure protection for both the Commercial and Federal sectors. BioFlyte is seeking motivated individuals to join their team to participate in building and scaling their work as they move from pre-production to broader commercialization. They are currently looking for software engineers, and you can learn more and apply on their site here.
Oak Ridge is a national research institution looking for a nonproliferation systems engineer to focus on their nuclear, AI, and infosec divisions. They’re looking for someone who can support existing, and help to develop new, research and development efforts to advance nuclear material control & accounting, international safeguards, and arms control applications. This is a unique opportunity for those interested in longtermism and the intersection of software and systems design. Learn more and apply.
Ginkgo Bioworks is looking for a bioinformatics engineer to join their team. Their mission is to make biology easier to engineer. Ginkgo is constructing, editing, and redesigning the living world in order to answer the globe’s growing challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more. Their bioengineers make use of an in-house automated foundry for designing and building new organisms. We at Impact Labs are recommending that people from within our community apply for the position if they’re interested not because we condone Ginkgo’s work explicitly (we believe they are an amoral company), but because we want kindhearted and high-integrity people working there to make sure it doesn’t slip into murkier waters. Tread carefully, friends!
What We’re Reading
The Soweto Uprising was a series of protests led by black schoolchildren in South Africa during Apartheid as a way of demonstrating their dismay at the introduction of Afrikaans in their classrooms. The brutality of the police crackdown that ensued propelled the issue to national and international recognition.
In 1990, communicable diseases made up a third of the global health burden. Now, that number is closer to a one sixth, despite the global population increasing. It’s a huge win for public health workers and the doctors, nurses, researchers, and patients who helped make this possible.
A quiet but forceful feminist wave is sweeping across China via social media despite heavy government censorship.
Quotes We Love
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
-Oscar Wilde
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