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Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI increases biosecurity risk at the margin, with how much depending on capability trajectories, biosecurity responses, and governance.

  Their words

  AI plausibly increases the risk at the margin. Whether that increase is small or catastrophic depends on factors such as AI capability trajectories, biosecurity responses, governance, etc.

  What AI can and cannot do in biosecurityyourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.

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  When liability for unverified failures approaches zero, verification budgets collapse and deployers flood systems with unmonitored agents while socializing catastrophic risks.

  Their words

  When liability exposure approaches 0—when no one pays the price for unverified failures—verification budgets collapse...Deployers flood the Runaway Risk Zone with unmonitored agents, capturing the gains of automation while socializing catastrophic risks.

  @naval on Xx.com

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Manhattan Project scientists underweighted institutional responses such as second-strike forces and mutually assured retaliation when judging the likelihood of catastrophic nuclear war.

  Their words

  They tended to underweight the endogenous response of political and military institutions to the catastrophe—the emergence of second-strike forces, elaborate command systems, crisis management, and above all mutually assured retaliation.

  marginalrevolution.com

Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.

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  Germany's crisis is too deep to be solved by conventional tax, spending, or regulatory adjustments.

  Their words

  Germany is in trouble. But the trouble goes deep and cannot be addressed by "more of the same" socio-economic measures in the domain of taxes or social spending or regulation.

  adamtooze.substack.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

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  AI-caused catastrophic extinction risk is negligible, but disasters like critical-infrastructure cyberattacks and bio-risks from AI are real and worth debating.

  Their words

  I put the probability of complete extinction as being so low it isn't worth discussing, but the probabilities of AI caused disasters - e.g. cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or bio-risks - as being worth debating.

  interconnects.ai

Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

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  Switching to sustainable energy is the one effective, scalable tool available to prevent catastrophic climate change.

  energy

  Their words

  "Just switching to sustainable energy" is in fact the one good, scalable weapon we have to fight that

  Two Menbillmckibben.substack.com

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

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  The insistence that any education innovation must serve everybody at once and for free is the poison that stops education innovating at all.

  Their words

  in education there's a concept that I think is really poison and why we have trouble innovating in education which is there's a view that you must serve everybody all at once for free like just anything you do in education no matter who it's for they're like I'm going to come up with a counter example where it doesn't work for everybody all at once for free and that's not how products are developed

  youtube.com

Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.

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  Global warming is destabilizing mountain glaciers, making catastrophic glacial-lake outburst floods more frequent.

  Their words

  As the planet warms, the entire region's frozen mountain slopes are becoming less stable, making glacier collapses-and the catastrophic floods they can unleash-far more likely.

  “What can I do?” The answer is still anything.heated.world

Novelist and writer on craft; wrote The War of Art, Gates of Fire and The Legend of Bagger Vance.

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  Finishing one piece of work, even a failed one, permanently removes the difficulty of finishing.

  Their words

  Once you finish—even one time, even on a project that ultimately fails—you will never have trouble finishing again.

  The Drive to Finishstevenpressfield.com

Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

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  A cabin in literature typically serves as an escape from trouble or a place where new trouble is found.

  Their words

  The cabin is a classic literary setting. It's the getaway spot where characters can flee to escape their troubles or journey to in order to find new ones.

  Processing: How Josh Riedel Edited Thirty Cabinscountercraft.substack.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

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  It is very hard to actually get stuck, because the action space is always larger than it appears.

  Their words

  Now, the good news is that in my experience, it's very difficult to actually get stuck. Um, you can get yourself into trouble and the action space is always larger than it appears.

  Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com

Professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M; writes The Climate Brink with Zeke Hausfather.

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  Climate change's effects will unfold as sudden catastrophic events rather than as steadily accumulating small changes.

  Their words

  The transformation to come will be decidedly nonlinear, meaning it will not occur as small impacts over many years but rather a series of infrequent, huge events of enormous destructive power.

  Wildfires are remaking the worldtheclimatebrink.com

Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

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  People who vibe-code a replacement for a product will rebuild the visible tip of the iceberg and then discover the downstream problems they never knew existed.

  Their words

  So, we're going to see people get into those where they're like, "Well, I vibe code the tip of the iceberg. I throw away the rest of the iceberg and now I'm in trouble because now I don't know what to do. Now I get to these downstream problems that I didn't even know existed." So, we're going to see on the on the side of the the the vibe coding replacers, we're going to see that kind of a naivity play out.

  youtube.com

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

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  The trouble with AI as a development tool is that it is overconfident in what it delivers, and its hit rate is nowhere near good enough.

  Their words

  The problem with AI right now is it’s overconfident in what it tries to deliver.

  youtube.com

Vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, the advertising agency; author of Alchemy (2019) and the Wiki Man columnist at The Spectator.

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  Marketing returns are fat-tailed, so paying for marketing by the hour misprices work whose value comes from a small fraction of it.

  Their words

  the reason it's a catastrophic way to be paid my argument is that marketing is actually fat tailed so is innovation R&D pharmaceutical research science okay in other words 5 to 10% of what you do delivers perhaps 110% of the value

  youtube.com

Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Fantastic Four

  Their words

  Fantastic Four. It was ok? Aside from a few things, I’m having trouble getting excited about post-Infinity Saga Marvel. There was just a special alchemy about that whole arc that is proving impossible to reproduce. (B)

  kottke.org

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

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  The recent fall in test scores is a rich-world phenomenon, and steeper in several European countries than in America, so it cannot be blamed on American policy.

  EuropeAmerica

  Their words

  Learning loss is a global phenomenon, exacerbated by a catastrophic event, not a structural flaw unique to the American education system.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

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  Deep learning generalises badly, and catastrophic interference with what a network already knew is the proof of it.

  Their words

  so we know deep learning is really bad at this for example we know that if you train on some new thing it will often catastrophically interfere with all the old things that you that you knew

  youtube.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

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  As search turns into an AI interface, a company with no earned acquisition channel on its roadmap is in serious trouble within one to two years.

  Their words

  Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the utmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth road map, you're going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

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  Most people find writing hard because writing well requires thinking clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.

  Their words

  The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.

  Writes and Write-Notspaulgraham.com

Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

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  Xi Jinping is mostly right about the problems he identifies, and his government's brute-force solutions reliably make them worse.

  government

  Their words

  The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things.

  2023 letterdanwang.co

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

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  The self-driving industry's strategy of answering criticism with 'we are saving lives' has failed, and it will have to change both how it deploys and how it talks.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  At a higher level, the real event was a catastrophic failure of the industry's strategy of relentlessly shouting as loud as they can "Hey, get off our case, we're busy saving lives here!"

  My Automated Vehicle Safety Prediction for 2024safeautonomy.blogspot.com

Software engineer writing about maintenance, open source and the industrial reality of software — the author of "I am not a supplier".

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  Maintainers of widely used open source software are not adequately funded, and that is a real and unsolved problem.

  open source

  Their words

  Hell even worse, a lot of the libraries that underpin the fabric of what we all call the digital economy have trouble getting enough money to pay for food.

  I am not a suppliersoftwaremaxims.com

Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.

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  Decision-bias research is itself biased, studying only how heuristics fail and never the strength they supply.

  Their words

  Um but nobody has done research on the positive side of these heuristics. And so, I think that's a bias on the part of the decision bias researchers that they're only looking at the down arrow. How do these heuristics get us in trouble? And they're not looking at the strength of these heuristics.

  youtube.com

Writer on time, productivity and limitation; wrote Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and the newsletter The Imperfectionist.

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  People cannot thrive while their primary psychological identification is with the news cycle rather than with their own lives.

  Their words

  The trouble is that human beings can't really function, let alone thrive, when their primary psychological identification is with things like "the news cycle" or "history" or "the course of world events."

  The news is not your lifeoliverburkeman.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

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  Builders reject new building systems rationally: a change to the process raises the odds of a catastrophic overrun by more than the innovation can save.

  Their words

  A new or innovative system that involves changes to the process thus incurs a significant risk penalty that would likely exceed the expected benefits of the innovation.

  Why It's Hard to Innovate in Constructionconstruction-physics.com

Writer and researcher, founder of New Science; writes essays on science funding, sleep research, productivity and ambition at guzey.com.

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  Academia has serious problems, but they are not as catastrophic as they look from outside it.

  Their words

  academia has a lot of problems and it could work much better. However, these problems are not as catastrophic as an outside perspective would suggest.

  guzey.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed

  Their words

  This book covers the mission and the details of the recovery efforts and the incredible work by Mission Control and by the astronauts to get the crew home safely after a catastrophic failure no one had even begun to plan for.

  blog.nelhage.com