Emerging Futures
Because the Future Isn't Coming Fast, It's Already Here
“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine…!” — REM
The world is changing at a furious pace which is only accelerating.
But it’s also a world we can make radically better, as individuals, as societies and as a species.
Some changes you’ll have heard of, like artificial intelligence, globalization breaking down and great-power conflict. Other forces - say cognitive warfare and human enhancement - you may know little about, and some may, like global warming, seem more like background noise than a threat we’re actively confronting.
I’m starting this site with a multi-part article - Artificial General Intelligence (And Superintelligence) And How To Survive It.
If you’re familiar with how fast AI is moving, particularly in the last year, this will come as no surprise to you.
What may come as a surprise is how much work I’ve done related to AI safety and other existential risks over the last 25 years, and how, and why, it’s coming to you now.
In 2017, in the wake of the 2016 election, I sent a message to the FBI explaining how critical elements reputedly involved in foreign-influence operations in the US could be turned against the powers behind them.
Cryptocurrency was a permanent, unerasable, open-source ledger of every transaction. Those exchanges could be combined with other data to form a living, global map of criminals, intelligence assets and their interconnections. Botnets were tremendously vulnerable, and formed an immense archive of their activities on computers not under their users’ control.
Those were elements in my first message, which was the first of many.
I followed with two methods for malware tracking and then data mining deep-cover operatives from existing public or government databases.
Then I discussed automating facial recognition, geolocation and data mining of videos for both the victims and perpetrators of sexual crimes and intelligence operatives, assets and moles.
By January 1, 2020, I laid out how to track weapons of mass destruction, drugs and natural pathogens globally as well as monitoring and tracing gunshots, cyber-intrusions and malware, all using massively distributed sensors and generative adversarial networks (GANs).
Five days later, the US Federal government banned the export of technology for automating the analysis of geospatial imagery, closely related to what I was describing, and six weeks later, defense contractor BAE announced they had a contract to track weapons of mass destruction by apparently much the same means I had explained.
I kept sending messages regarding many further options, including how to unravel illegal online-influence networks - not merely to disrupt bots and trolls, but to trace back the money, the employers and the customers.
Finally, at the end of 2020, in the wake of the Solarwinds hack, I explained how to use AI to automate cyberdefenses, not merely to root out what was done, but to thwart intrusions in the future.
In recent months, the US, UK and NATO have all essentially acknowledged using AI to automate their cybersecurity.
Whether I was the catalyst for any of the responses mentioned above, I have no idea.
What is more pertinent is the reason I had so many of these tools ready to go so quickly from 2017 to 2020. Some I’d already created, wholly or in part, and others I was primed to develop given work I’d been doing for decades.
Why? Incredible opportunities in science and technology often come hand-in-hand with incredible dangers, and the most-powerful emerging technologies, like AI, pose existential risks to all humanity.
When your realize the stakes, you plan accordingly, and plan I did.
I did not plan to waste my best efforts on thwarting the most incompetent conspiracies in history. The resources which contributed to unraveling them are now loose in the world, many of them in public domain, and it is time to use them for their intended purpose.
Protecting the human race and advancing our collective civilization.
I am convinced that people and organizations of good will, given the right insights, will be able to act decisively.
Not just to prevent attacks or preempt their adversaries, but to create a far better life for everyone.
The world has abruptly come to understand AI could be turned into a weapon - or disaster - capable of ending all of us.
Or AI could help us create a utopia of almost unimaginable prosperity.
Artificial intelligence isn’t the only emerging technology of immense importance, but it’s the one arriving fastest and landing hardest.
Indeed, it’s already here.
This site will be covering threats and opportunities in an era of incredibly fast change, not just what they are, but how to use them to create a better world for everyone.
Emerging technologies such as AI will be prominent subjects, but we will also be discussing technologies which have long since emerged, such as cognitive warfare, how they are already being used, and what to do about them.
For the first several days of its existence, I will be posting once a day. Each day I’ll post another part of my article - Artificial General Intelligence (And Superintelligence) And How To Survive It.
Once I’ve posted the entirety of that article, I will slow to every other day with my public posts, then bi-weekly, and then hopefully just once a week.
I say hopefully because while I’m excited by the changes we’re seeing, they are coming very fast. We’ll see if anything less than bi-weekly will work.
These later articles will cover critical and emerging technologies, and the new world they’re creating for us. They will also discuss how we’re not passive observers in these changes, but active participants, and how the smallest actions, or even choosing not to act, can affect far more than just ourselves.
I plan to post redacted versions of at least a few of the messages I sent to the FBI from 2017 to 2020, and will certainly refer to them and quote from them as we move forward. But what we have to talk about is the future, not merely the past, so I’ll be using them to illustrate unique vulnerabilities of malicious actors and how much ground potential rogue or uncontrolled AIs have already lost, before they can even begin.
Most of these posts will be free to my free subscribers. What paid subscribers will get is the chance to post questions, and once a week, I’ll answer as many as I can to the best of my ability. I won’t write a book a week, or share every invention I’ve created, but I look forward to continuing the conversation with you.
Founding members will find their questions are prioritized.
Everyone asking questions will also discover they’re shaping the conversation, in turn, and may bring new understandings to light by asking all of us to look deeper into what we know, what we don’t know, and what we imagine to be real.