U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Enlightenment Salon with Jeffrey Ladish
At a time when US political thinking is obsessed with maps of reds and blues, it’s nice to take a step back and think about the longer term potential of coun...
Security and the Future
Welcome to my home page. The picture above is one I took in Black Rock City, one of several important places that has influenced how I see the world. To me it represents people getting together and making meaning. Hacking cool stuff together and sharing it. Humans exploring the boundaries of what's possible, and all the failures and complexities that involves.
I spend a lot of my time thinking about security and the future. Not just cybersecurity, but also security at the level of civilizational systems. What would happen to us if there was a nuclear war? What are the risks and rewards posed by advances in biotechnology and machine learning? I also spend a lot of time thinking about how people work. I'm curious about new and old ways of working together to build good communities, governance systems, and ultimately a thriving and robust civilization.
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
Was SARS-CoV-2 actually present in March 2019 wastewater samples?
While likely a false positive, I argue that, given the scale and uncertainties of the pandemic, a rigorous investigation of the preprint claim mentioned in R...
Video: Getting Ahead of Future Catastrophes
I really enjoyed talking with Keith about the future of civilization, what risks we face, and how we navigate through them! Also I encourage you to check out...
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...
Update on civilizational collapse research
In this post I share my thoughts on civilizational collapse and answer some questions on the topic posed by Oliver Habryka.
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
The atom bomb, together with the long range bomber, marked the first time a small group of people could destroy dozens of cities in a matter of hours. The ph...
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
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 of 2019 in San Francisco and som...