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AI risks are typically framed around physical threats to humanity, a loss of control or an accidental error causing humanity's extinction. However, I argue in line with the gradual disempowerment thesis, that there is an underappreciated…
We present a general prediction scheme of failure times based on updating continuously with time the probability for failure of the global system, conditioned on the information revealed on the pre-existing idiosyncratic realization of the…
In 2018 the European Commission highlighted the demand of a human-centered approach to AI. Such a claim is gaining even more relevance considering technologies specifically designed to directly interact and physically collaborate with human…
The blockchain technology promises to transform finance, money and even governments. However, analyses of blockchain applicability and robustness typically focus on isolated systems whose actors contribute mainly by running the consensus…
The proliferation of network-connected devices and applications has resulted in people receiving dozens, or hundreds, of notifications per day. When people are in the presence of others, each notification poses some risk of accidental…
Catastrophic transitions, where a system shifts abruptly between alternate steady states, are a generic feature of many nonlinear systems. Recently these regime shift were suggested as the mechanism underlies many ecological catastrophes,…
The transmission of news stories in global culture has changed fundamentally in the last three decades. The general public are alerted to breaking stories on increasingly rapid timescales, and the discussion/distortion of facts by writers,…
Most research on human-robot handovers focuses on the development of comfortable and efficient HRI; few have studied handover failures. If a failure occurs in the beginning of the interaction, it prevents the whole handover process and…
The technological singularity refers to a hypothetical scenario in which technological advances virtually explode. The most popular scenario is the creation of super-intelligent algorithms that recursively create ever higher intelligences.…
Smartphone-based earthquake early warning systems implemented by citizen science initiatives are characterized by a significant variability in their smartphone network geometry. This has an direct impact on the earthquake detection…
It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these events are. We propose a method…
The increasing prevalence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in safety-critical contexts such as air-traffic control leads to systems that are practical and efficient, and to some extent explainable to humans to be trusted and accepted. The…
Currently we produce 10 to power 21 digital bits of information annually on Earth. Assuming 20 percent annual growth rate, we estimate that 350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth, or 10…
Transformative AI technologies have the potential to reshape critical aspects of society in the near future. However, in order to properly prepare policy initiatives for the arrival of such technologies accurate forecasts and timelines are…
Society's drive toward ever faster socio-technical systems, means that there is an urgent need to understand the threat from 'black swan' extreme events that might emerge. On 6 May 2010, it took just five minutes for a spontaneous mix of…
The lack of evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life, even the simplest forms of animal life, makes it is difficult to decide whether the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is more a high-risk, high-payoff endeavor…
Two 2025 publications, "AI 2027" (Kokotajlo et al., 2025) and "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (Yudkowsky & Soares, 2025), assert that superintelligent artificial intelligence will almost certainly destroy or render humanity obsolete…
Natural hazards are becoming increasingly expensive as climate change and development are exposing communities to greater risks. Preparation and recovery are critical for climate change resilience, and social media are being used more and…
Vehicles with a safety function for anticipating crashes in advance can enhance drivers' ability to avoid crashes. As dashboard cameras have become a low-cost sensor device accessible to almost every vehicle, deep neural networks for crash…
Public product launches in Artificial Intelligence can serve as focusing events for collective attention, surfacing how societies react to technological change. Social media provide a window into the sensemaking around these events,…