Getting Ahead of Future Catastrophes - Jeffrey Ladish

In this interview, I sit down with Jeffrey Ladish to discuss future existential and catastrophic planetary risks and what we can do to stop them / mitigate their effects.

Jeffrey is a fellow at the Foresight Institute, a research organization dedicated to assessing the risks and opportunities presented by emerging technologies. Jeffrey's research focuses on nuclear risk, bio security, and cybersecurity - working to map out the catastrophic and existential risk landscape as thoroughly as possible for both himself and organizations dedicated to preparing for future crises.

Jeffrey's Medium: Absent Coordination Future Technology will cause Human Extinction
Foresight Panels
https://foresight.org/salon/people-friendly-coordination-tech/
Mastering the Dance: Rebooting Society with Testing and Tracing | Jeffrey Ladish


The play-by-play:
0:00 - Introductions
1:12 - Christian upbringings, ethics, and humanities capacity for self-destruction
4:40 - Developing a intuitive respect for the gravity of nuclear risk
8:00 - Valuing the latent potential of our collective future
11:00 - Which risks are most impactful, urgent, overlooked, and prone to bifurcation
14:00 - Mapping the existential risk landscape
16:00 - Biorisk
17:30 - "A deep and difficult understanding is what's required to make progress"
18:45 - Incentives and disincentives for bioterrorism
22:00 - State-sponsored bioweapon research
24:00 - Synthetic biology risks and destabilizing ecosystems - mirror life
30:00 - Institutional Reform to Combat Existential Risk
31:00 - Importance of international institutions
33:30 - One World or None - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1681403.One_World_or_None
35:00 - Nuclear treaties
37:00 - "Everyone's incentives in the longterm are aligned"
39:00 - Optimizing for long term planning as an overlooked strategic lens
40:30 - Institutions working on the cutting edge of Existential Risk research and systemic resiliency
44:30 - "-we have to have healthy functioning institutions... we can do very broad things in social movements, but social movements can't do very fine grained or long term planning type things. So we need institutions to do that."
45:10 - Institutional senescence
48:30 - Blockchain governance methods
50:00 - Futarchy
52:00 - Cryptosecurity, Post-Quantum Cryptography and Trustable Trustless Institutions
54:00 - Hard Forks to address Quantum Security
56:00 - Book Recommendations - Strategy and Conflict, The Selfish Gene, Glen Weyl - Radical Markets, Samo Burja - Great Founder Theory
58:30 - Thinking long term about risks/resiliency in your own community