Sentinel

Sentinel monitors world events for potential precursors to catastrophes. It publishes a weekly newsletter with events of interest (such as “Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on Israel” or “Two people in California have been infected with bird flu”).

Sentinel’s mission is to alert relevant parties so that looming catastrophes can be averted before they happen.

You can read more information on Sentinel’s Manifund page (short) and fundraising memo (long).

Some thoughts:

• I believe almost nobody would do a good job of running Sentinel because it’s hard to identify early warning signals of catastrophes. But Sentinel is run by members of Samotevsky Forecasting, who I expect to be unusually good at this.
• The value of Sentinel depends on who’s paying attention to its reports. I don’t know who’s paying attention to its reports.
• Sentinel isn’t immediately relevant to AI policy, but it could be extremely valuable in certain situations. Namely, it could provide early warning if AI x-risk rapidly increases due to some series of events.
• AI x-risk aside, I still think Sentinel has high EV because it potentially significantly reduces catastrophic risk for a small budget. Without having investigated those cause areas, Sentinel is tentatively my #1 donation pick for reducing nuclear and biological x-risks.

Sentinel currently has four team members working part-time. With additional funding, its members could work full-time and it could hire more members and therefore do more comprehensive monitoring.