Deputy Director at the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative.
This is something that BERI has actually been discussing! If anyone is interested in talking to us more about this (either from a hiring/evaluation perspective or from a candidate perspective, you can send an email to contact@existence.org and I'll follow up.
Absolutely! Our focus this year is on reinforcements and intersections of risk, so we will be doing more interdisciplinary sessions rather than doing deep-dives or having highly technical conversations focused solely on siloed risk areas. This would be a great way to students to get exposed to a wide variety of different ideas and perspectives without needing much, if any, background or technical knowledge.
Absolutely! Our goal is to ensure a diverse audience of people from many backgrounds, both within and outside Stanford. However, we do have limited in-person capacity, and we are giving some preference to individuals with a track record of working in multiple x-risk topics areas to support this year's focus on x-risk intersections and reinforcements. That said, we have ample virtual space available, so we encourage almost everyone to sign up for online attendance!
Given the focus on intersections and reinforcements, our panels and presentations will be very interdisciplinary and cross-cutting; we won't be doing deep dives into specific topic areas. So don't expect extended sessions solely focused on AI, nuclear war, etc.
Likely a reason this hasn't been done yet (and why we aren't saying 100% we'll do this)--it's very difficult to create a "good" application and process, nonetheless create one that multiple orgs would all find valuable and be able to fit into their workflows. I'm happy to listen to any feedback/input you may have on applications that you thought allowed you to present yourself best.