Improving U.S. national security by advocating for better governance of emerging technology
AFTER is a 501(c)(4) non-profit and social welfare organization. AFTER promotes governance that will maximize the benefits of emerging technologies, especially by mitigating their risks to humanity, including catastrophic and existential risk.
Catastrophic risk as a policy priority
“Technological advances may increase the number of existential threats; threats that could damage life on a global scale challenge our ability to imagine and comprehend their potential scope and scale, and they require the development of resilient strategies to survive. Technology plays a role in both generating these existential risks and in mitigating them. Anthropomorphic risks include runaway AI, engineered pandemics, nanotechnology weapons, or nuclear war. Such low-probability, high-impact events are difficult to forecast and expensive to prepare for but identifying potential risks and developing mitigation strategies in advance can provide some resilience to exogenous shocks.”
“Learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, we can seize this opportunity to better anticipate and prepare to respond to large-scale global crises. This requires stronger legal frameworks, better tools for managing risks, better data, the identification and anticipation of future risks, and proper financing of prevention and preparedness…. Importantly, however, any new preparedness and response measures should be agnostic as to the type of crisis for which they may be needed. We do not know which extreme risk event will come next; it might be another pandemic, a new war, a high-consequence biological attack, a cyberattack on critical infrastructure, a nuclear event, a rapidly moving environmental disaster, or something completely different such as technological or scientific developments gone awry and unconstrained by effective ethical and regulatory frameworks.”
Team
Jared Brown
President