by Malcolm Murray The question of the day on everyone’s minds is whether AI is a boom or a bust. But if we lift our eyes ever so slightly from the question of the day and look at the bigger picture, two bigger questions come into view. One: Will AI take our jobs? This debate…

by Malcolm Murray I recently finished reading Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government and Citizenship – a book by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders on the effects of AI on democracy. It comes out soon (October 25). It is a good read, worth reading for its myriad examples of AI in action…

by Malcolm Murray “A clearly written and compelling account of the existential risks that highly advanced AI could pose to humanity.” — Ben Bernanke “Humans are lucky to have Yudkowsky and Soares in our corner, reminding us not to waste the brief window that we have to make decisions about our future.”— Grimes Probably the…

by Malcolm Murray Recently, the system card for Claude 4 showed a fascinating finding – what happens when you let two Claudes engage in a prolonged dialogue with each other? They end up meditating and sharing Buddhist wisdom, such as “In perfect stillness, consciousness recognizes consciousness, and the eternal dance continues”. Especially, they share nondual…

by Malcolm Murray If you in any way follow AI policy, you will likely have heard that the EU AI Act’s Code of Practice (CoP) was released on July 10. This is one of the major developments in AI policy this year. 2025 has otherwise been fairly negative for AI safety and risk – the…

by Malcolm Murray When it comes to AI, or even worse, “AGI”, we are facing a crisis of language. Different people use the terms to mean drastically different things. This is deeply unhelpful for productive debate. This point was hammered home to me several times this week. On LinkedIn, I debated appropriate risk management techniques for…

by Malcolm Murray Aella, a well-known rationalist blogger, famously claimed she no longer saves for retirement since she believes Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will change everything long before retirement would become relevant. I’ve been thinking lately about how one should invest for AGI, and I think it begs a bigger question of how much one…

by Malcolm Murray Enrico Fermi famously asked – allegedly out loud over lunch in the cafeteria – “Where is everybody?”, as he realized the disconnect between the large number of habitable planets in the universe and the number of alien civilizations we actually had observed. Today, we could in a similar vein ask ourselves, “Where…

by Malcolm Murray By 2030, we will have countries of geniuses in data centers, but we won’t know what to do with them. In my 10+ years as a Superforecaster, I have picked up many techniques and lessons regarding forecasting. Given the fractured state of the debate on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and AI progress,…

by Malcolm Murray The Paris AI Summit the other week might have been the end of a 10-year run for AI safety as Azeem Azhar, the creator of Exponential View, put it. The concept of AI safety, which can be said to have started in earnest with Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence, had a 10-year…

by Malcolm Murray As someone who thinks about AI day-in and day-out, it is always fascinating to see which events in the AI space break out of the AI bubble and into the attention of the wider public. ChatGPT in November 2022 was of course one. The podcast-creating ability of Google’s NotebookLM almost got there,…

by Malcolm Murray Oops. During most of 2024, all the talk was of deep learning hitting a wall. There were secret rumors coming out of OpenAI and Anthropic that their latest training runs were disappointing. People were confidently stating that AI progress had now hit a plateau. Importantly, this was not just a few pundits…

by Malcolm Murray The world does not lend itself well to steady states. Rather, there is always a constant balancing act between opposing forces. We see this now play out forcefully in AI. To take a step back, the balancing act is present whether we look at the micro or the macro level. On the…

by Malcolm Murray What does the election of Trump mean for risks to society from advanced AI? Given the wide spectrum of risks from advanced AI, the answer will depend very much on which AI risks one is most concerned about. The AI risk spectrum can be drawn from the near-term, high-certainty risks such as…

by Malcolm Murray There is a strawman factory smack in the middle of the AI risk debate. Given the complexity of AI risk, we are seeing a lot of weak arguments, focusing only on one aspect of AI risk or AI risk management. In fact, AI risk has become a bit of a “strawman factory”,…

by Malcolm Murray In the 21st century, only two risks matter – climate change and advanced AI. It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and get lost in the maelstrom of “news” hitting our screens. There is a plethora of low-level events constantly vying for our attention. As a risk consultant and…

by Malcolm Murray The battle lines are drawn. AI safety is fighting a battle on three fronts. The figure shows how the AI safety viewpoint is opposed to three others, on two dimensions. First, let’s define the axes. The debate over advanced AI and its risks and benefits has many dimensions, but here we focus…

by Malcolm Murray As AI evolves, so do the risks it poses on society. The risks of AI today are already unrecognizable from those of a few years ago. As a dual-use technology, similar to nuclear power, the capabilities of AI bring great benefits as well as great risks. As opposed to nuclear power, however,…