Video: Getting Ahead of Future Catastrophes
I’ve been experimenting with various ways of talking about my global risk research. Podcasts were next on my list. 📻🎙
Securing a Future
This image is from the remnants of ancient Rome, as seen in 2019. Human civilizations, like individuals, seem to age and decay over time. Given enough time, species tend to go extinct. There is no reason to think ours is any exception. Except this time, we have far more power to alter our environment. Power to create and power to destroy. I'm looking for a way we can escape this trap, and build something for our descendents that will last.
You'll find a collection of my work here: guides to securing your online accounts and personal devices, write-ups on risks from emerging technologies, book and article reviews, and some information about me. If you're interested in the motivation for my work, and how I think we got here, read this post.
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Recent Posts
Video: Two Salons on digital contact tracing and privacy
In these two Salons, I discuss contact tracing and privacy with my fellow panelists. There are real tradeoffs between privacy and disease survelliance, but n...
COVID-19 Molecular Diagnostics Brief
This report was part of an effort to provide a technology overview and policy recommendations on COVID-19 diagnostics for policy makers in the midst of the C...
Anatomy of a rental phishing scam 🎣
I was recently the (unsuccessful) target of a very well-crafted phishing scam. As part of a housing search a few weeks ago, I was trawling craigslist and zil...
Absent coordination, future technology will cause human extinction
Originally written on Medium Nick Bostrom, of the Future of Humanity Institute, uses an evocative metaphor to describe the future of humanity’s technologi...
One Hundred Opinions on Nuclear War
One of my friends on Twitter, Venkatesh Rao, recently challenged people to write one hundred tweets on one topic. I took the bait, and wrote one hundred op...
The Problem with San Francisco
Originally written on Medium Smoke chokes the city, the nearby forests are on fire, and towns are burning down as I sit here writing this. It is the fall ...
AI Impacts on Escalation Paths to Nuclear Conflicts
This is an excerpt from the Foresight 2019 AGI Cooperation Report. At the workshop, I led a session on the impact of AI on nuclear escalation paths. Here I s...
Does the US nuclear policy still target cities?
The history of nuclear strategic bombing Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine brought my attention to a horrifying fact about early US nuclear targeting...
Video: Civilization Collapse - Scenarios, Prevention, Response
At this Salon hosted by the Foresight Institute, David Denkenberger and I talk about the risks of civilizational collapse and how we can mitigate them.