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A new solution to the Fermi Paradox is presented: probes or visits from putative alien civilizations have a very low probability until a civilization reaches a certain age (called the Contact Era) after the onset of radio communications. If…
Within journalistic editorial processes, disclosing AI usage is currently limited to simplistic labels, which misses the nuance of how humans and AI collaborated on a news article. Through co-design sessions (N=10), we elicited 69…
Classical arguments for skepticism regarding the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are critically examined. It is suggested that the emerging class of "phase transition" astrobiological models can simultaneously account for…
AI that can accelerate research could drive a century of technological progress over just a few years. During such a period, new technological or political developments will raise consequential and hard-to-reverse decisions, in rapid…
Since 1973 the State Department has been using electronic records systems to preserve classified communications. Recently, approximately 1.9 million of these records from 1973-77 have been made available by the U.S. National Archives. While…
We study a rational expectation model of bubbles and crashes. The model has two components : (1) our key assumption is that a crash may be caused by local self-reinforcing imitation between noise traders. If the tendency for noise traders…
In January 2026, torrential rains killed 200-300 people across Southern Africa, exposing a critical reality: 60% of the continent lacks effective early warning systems due to infrastructure costs. Traditional radar stations exceed USD 1…
Numerous Earth-destroying doomsday scenarios have recently been analyzed, including breakdown of a metastable vacuum state and planetary destruction triggered by a "strangelet'' or microscopic black hole. We point out that many previous…
Contrary to common belief, as the time since the last earthquake in a certain region increases, the risk of occurrence of another earthquake diminishes. As a consequence, the expected waiting time to the next event increases with the…
In human-AI interactions, explanation is widely seen as necessary for enabling trust in AI systems. We argue that trust, however, may be a pre-requisite because explanation is sometimes impossible. We derive this result from a formalization…
Earthquake is one of the natural disasters which cannot be either controlled or predicted absolutely. Since preventing earthquake is impossible, preventing its damages is also difficult. Unfortunately, after each earthquake and its…
This paper is a submission to the Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest. In it, we estimate the likelihood of transformative artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2043 and find it to be <1%. Specifically, we argue: The bar is high: AGI…
The intuition suggested by the Drake equation implies that technology should be less prevalent than biology in the galaxy. However, it has been appreciated for decades in the SETI community that technosignatures could be more abundant,…
Social media platforms, such as Twitter, have been increasingly used by people during natural disasters to share information and request for help. Hurricane Harvey was a category 4 hurricane that devastated Houston, Texas, USA in August…
The answers people give when asked to 'think of the unexpected' for everyday event scenarios appear to be more expected than unexpected. There are expected unexpected outcomes that closely adhere to the given information in a scenario,…
This study examines the hypothesis that the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), culminating in the emergence of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), could act as a "Great Filter" that is responsible for the scarcity of…
Social media has become an essential channel for posting disaster-related information, which provide governments and relief agencies real-time data for better disaster management. However, research in this field has not received sufficient…
This report presents findings from an expert survey on digital minds takeoff scenarios. The survey was conducted in early 2025 with 67 experts in digital minds research, AI research, philosophy, forecasting, and related fields. Participants…
We are witnessing the emergence of an AI economy and society where AI technologies are increasingly impacting health care, business, transportation and many aspects of everyday life. Many successes have been reported where AI systems even…
Little by little, newspapers are revealing the bright future that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is building. Intelligent machines will help everywhere. However, this bright future has a dark side: a dramatic job market contraction before its…