How to Stop the Future from Destroying Us

Joe Banks in Vice:

Explaining to the uninitiated exactly who Vinay Gupta is, and what he does, isn’t easy.

The last time I interviewed him for VICE, nine years ago, the article was headlined The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total Collapse of Humanity in Order to Save It.’ Gupta was described as a “software engineer, disaster consultant, global resilience guru, and visionary.” It’s less a career than a vocation—one that reflects a life spent joining together all the scattered dots of where human civilization is now, in order to eliminate the threats that menace its future.

Gupta was part of the original ‘Cypherpunk‘ generation that shaped the utopian early days of the internet in the 1990s. But as well as being a long-established figure in computing, he has a broader history of applying his problem-solving engineer’s mindset to the issues of a sustainable human presence on Earth.

More here.

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