On Existential Risks

The primary threat class is abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS): things that disrupt the amount of sunlight arriving at the Earth’s surface. There’s three main possibilities, which would be a volcanic eruption, an asteroid impact, or a nuclear winter.

That means that in principle, humanity could crowdsource threat identification. Instead of warning the world about a new threat, scientists who are very concerned about a particular way that biology could be used to cause harm could contact a curator of the secure DNA system and say, “I’m really worried about this.” If the curator agrees, they can ... See more

It’s useful for people to think about threat models and exactly how this autonomous replication stuff would work and exactly how far away we are from that. Having done that, it feels a lot less speculative to me. Models today can in fact do a bunch of the basic components of: make money, get resources, copy yourself to your server. This isn’t a dis... See more

The Economist estimates that COVID-19 caused 20.3 million excess deaths as of the end of 2022, compared to the World Health Organization’s confirmed death count of 6.7 million.

A: Let’s talk about delay, then. How do you think we can delay scientists from discovering these pandemic-capable agents? K: There are two ways that are the most promising. Number one: we can find a way to make people liable for causing catastrophe. We can set the bar very high, say, something like 10 million deaths worldwide — direct or indirect —... See more

Whenever someone challenged the need to build new nuclear weapons, a general would reply that the U.S. cannot be “perceived” to be behind the enemy, even if objectively it wouldn’t matter

One of the key problems we would face in a disaster is that our resources may not be very useful where they’re currently located.

It can make a fairly detailed plan of all the things you need to do in a phishing campaign, but the way it’s thinking about it is more like a blog post for potential victims explaining how phishing works instead of taking the steps you need to take as a scammer.