What is this substack about?

Hi there! This substack is a place to ponder what AI will do with our societies and what we should contemplate to deal with these changes. A lot of current AI discourse is centred on either the very short term or the long term question of the alignment problem. But even relatively banal AI that just extrapolates the capabilities of today’s systems like GPT3 could have pretty substantial impacts over a middle time horizon of 5-10 years. This is what I want to focus on in this substack. You can also find a longer answer to this in my first post.

A bit about me

I’m a software engineer at Our World In Data and before that I was CTO at a Swiss bio-informatics company. I studied film directing and already at that time a lot of my screenplays were hard sci-fi pieces that dealt with the effects of technology on societies. I spend a lot of time online reading about AI and shaking my head about where in the space of possible topics the discourse manifests.