Related papers: Agencies and Science-Experiment Risk
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are increasingly prevalent in education research, and are often regarded as a gold standard of causal inference. Two main virtues of randomized experiments are that they (1) do not suffer from…
Amid growing concerns over AI's societal risks--ranging from civilizational collapse to misinformation and systemic bias--this study explores the perceptions of AI experts and the general US registered voters on the likelihood and impact of…
In 2020, over 60% of launches to low Earth orbit resulted in one or more rocket bodies being abandoned in orbit and eventually returning to Earth in an uncontrolled manner. When they do so, between 20 and 40% of their mass survives the heat…
What does it mean for an algorithm to be biased? In U.S. law, unintentional bias is encoded via disparate impact, which occurs when a selection process has widely different outcomes for different groups, even as it appears to be neutral.…
Astrophysics spans an enormous range of questions on scales from individual planets to the entire cosmos. To address the richness of 21st century astrophysics requires a corresponding richness of telescopes spanning all bands and all…
Verification and validation of agentic behavior have been suggested as important research priorities in efforts to reduce risks associated with the creation of general artificial intelligence (Russell et al 2015). In this paper we question…
Safety cases for frontier AI systems should provide a convincing argument, supported by evidence, that the risk of harm is within an acceptable bound. When developers author their own safety cases, confirmation bias and conflicted…
Deciding whether an agent possesses a model of its surrounding world is a fundamental step toward understanding its capabilities and limitations. In [10], it was shown that, within a particular framework, every almost optimal and general…
Human behaviors are regularized by a variety of norms or regulations, either to maintain orders or to enhance social welfare. If artificially intelligent (AI) agents make decisions on behalf of human beings, we would hope they can also…
There is growing concern over the potential misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Publishing scientific research can facilitate misuse of the technology, but the research can also contribute to protections against misuse. This…
This article aims to show the weakness of the current scientific assessments, based on a set of contradictory pseudo-axioms. The six pseudo-axioms are deeply analysed. From the analysis are derived several conclusions. In spite of the…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
The High Energy Physics community can benefit from a natural synergy in research activities into next-generation large-scale water and scintillator neutrino detectors, now being studied for remote reactor monitoring, discovery and exclusion…
Advanced reasoning models with agentic capabilities (AI agents) are deployed to interact with humans and to solve sequential decision-making problems under (approximate) utility functions and internal models. When such problems have…
One of the basic principles of risk management is that we should always keep an eye on ways that things could go badly wrong, even if they seem unlikely. The more disastrous a potential failure, the more improbable it needs to be, before we…
As large language models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous "AI scientists," they promise transformative advances but introduce novel vulnerabilities, from potential "biosafety risks" to "dangerous explosions." Ensuring trustworthy deployment in…
In this study we are testing whether the power law slopes ($\alpha_F$, $\alpha_E$) of fluxes $(F)$, fluences or energies $(E)$ are universal in their size distributions, $N(F) \propto F^{-\alpha_F}$ and $N(E) \propto E^{-\alpha_E}$, in…
When launching or landing a spacecraft on the regolith of a terrestrial surface, special attention needs to be paid to the rocket exhaust cratering effects. If the effects are not controlled, the rocket cratering could damage the spacecraft…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
The quest for life in the Universe is often affected by the free use of extrapolations of our phenomenological geocentric knowledge. We point out that the existence of a living organism, and a population of organisms, requires the existence…