Doomsday Clock

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pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

MIT finance professor Andrew Lo, and his student Amir Khandani, published a definitive study of the meltdown in October 2007 called “What Happened to the Quants?” Ominously, they evoked an apocryphal Doomsday Clock for the global financial system. In August 2007, the clock ticked nearer to midnight, perhaps the closest it had come to financial Armageddon since Long-Term Capital’s implosion in 1998. “If we were to develop a Doomsday Clock for the hedge-fund industry’s impact on the global financial system,” they wrote, “calibrated to five minutes to midnight in August 1998, and fifteen minutes to midnight in January 1999, then our current outlook for the state of systemic risk in the hedge-fund industry is about 11:51 P.M.

For Mom and Pop Contents The Players 1 ALL IN 2 THE GODFATHER: ED THORP 3 BEAT THE MARKET 4 THE VOLATILITY SMILE 5 FOUR OF A KIND 6 THE WOLF 7 THE MONEY GRID 8 LIVING THE DREAM 9 “I KEEP MY FINGERS CROSSED FOR THE FUTURE” 10 THE AUGUST FACTOR 11 THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK 12 A FLAW 13 THE DEVIL’S WORK 14 DARK POOLS Notes Glossary Acknowledgments The Players Peter Muller, outspokenly eccentric manager of Morgan Stanley’s secretive hedge fund PDT. A whip-smart mathematician who occasionally took to New York’s subways to play his keyboard for commuters, in 2007 Muller had just returned to his hedge fund after a long sabbatical, with grand plans of expanding operations and juicing returns even further.

In response to the volatility, the Federal Reserve, which didn’t know about the SocGen trades, slashed short-term rates by three-quarters of a point, a bold move that frightened investors because it smacked of panic. Still, even as the system teetered on the edge, many of the smartest investors in the world couldn’t see the destructive tsunami heading directly for them. The implosion of Bear Stearns in March was a wake-up call. The Doomsday Clock was ticking. Around 1:00 p.m. on March 13, 2008, Jimmy Cayne sat down at a card table in Detroit and began to craft his strategy. The seventy-four-year-old chairman of Bear Stearns, seeded fourth in a group of 130 in the IMP Pairs category of the North American Bridge Championship, was squarely focused on the cards in his hand.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

The Clinton doctrine affirmed that the United States is entitled to resort to the “unilateral use of military power” even to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources,” let alone alleged “security” or “humanitarian” concerns.44 Adherence to various versions of this doctrine has been well confirmed in practice, as need hardly be discussed among people willing to look at the facts of current history. These are among the critical matters that should be the focus of attention in analyzing the nuclear deal at Vienna. 22 The Doomsday Clock In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced its famous Doomsday Clock to three minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for thirty years. The Bulletin’s statement explaining this advance toward catastrophe invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and “unchecked climate change.”

And this is not happening just in the U.S.; in Europe the impact may be even worse.10 Let us turn to the other (and traditional) concern of the atomic scientists who adjust the Doomsday Clock: nuclear weapons. The current threat of nuclear war amply justifies their January 2015 decision to advance the clock two minutes toward midnight. What has happened since reveals the growing threat even more clearly, a matter that elicits insufficient concern, in my opinion. The last time the Doomsday Clock reached three minutes before midnight was in 1983, at the time of the Able Archer exercises of the Reagan administration; these exercises simulated attacks on the Soviet Union to test their defense systems.

Russia also ordered its missile cruiser Moskva, with its long-range air defense system, to move closer to shore, so that it may be “ready to destroy any aerial target posing a potential danger to our aircraft,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced. All of this sets the stage for confrontations that could be lethal.19 Tensions are also constant at NATO-Russian borders, including military maneuvers on both sides. Shortly after the Doomsday Clock was moved ominously close to midnight, the national press reported that “U.S. military combat vehicles paraded Wednesday through an Estonian city that juts into Russia, a symbolic act that highlighted the stakes for both sides amid the worst tensions between the West and Russia since the Cold War.”20 Shortly before, a Russian warplane came within seconds of colliding with a Danish civilian airliner.


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Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Because most other investors weren’t worried about risk, and volatility was near record lows, Universa was able to quickly load up on dirt cheap S&P 500 puts and VIX call options—bets on a spike in volatility—before things went crazy. * * * On January 23, 2020, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock twenty seconds closer to midnight—“closer,” it said, “to apocalypse than ever”—a symbolic one hundred seconds to humanity’s ruin. The group, founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and others involved in creating the atomic bomb, cited climate change, the ever-present threat of nuclear disaster, and cyber-enabled information warfare as the most prominent factors forcing the heightened threat level.

At least part of the truth was revealed in June 2021 when Greenpeace UK released a secret recording of an ExxonMobil lobbyist named Keith McCoy bragging about how the oil giant’s support for a carbon tax was “a great talking point”—but it would never happen. “Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans,” McCoy said. “And the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that.” CHAPTER 20 THE GAMBLE On January 27, 2021, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists said its Doomsday Clock stood at one hundred seconds to midnight—unmoved since the previous year. Two big things had changed in those twelve months. Covid-19 was killing people around the world. And Donald Trump was no longer president of the United States. The second apparently offset the first to some extent—at least, the scientists nodded in that direction.

The problem it illuminated was that humanity—or at least most of it, since some countries, such as New Zealand, Australia, and South Korea, had fared relatively well—had seriously bungled its response, leading to the death of millions. The pandemic was a “historic wake-up call,” Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, said in its annual Doomsday Clock statement. The disastrous response to Covid-19 illustrated “that national governments and international organizations are unprepared to manage nuclear weapons and climate change, which currently pose existential threats to humanity, or other dangers—including more virulent pandemics and next-generation warfare—that could threaten civilization in the near future.”


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

But long before that, the Sun will start to burn hotter as it consumes its hydrogen; about half a billion years from now, the temperature on Earth will have risen enough to make the oceans boil.12 Those timescales are long enough that we might be forgiven for not getting too worried. The best metric for proximate danger is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Starting in 1947, a group of scientists and engineers created the Doomsday Clock to show how far we were from apocalypse. As the threat of nuclear holocaust receded, the proximity of the clock to midnight started to take into account the possibility that through climate change, biotechnology, and/or cyber-technology we could cause irrevocable harm to our way of life and the planet.

The technological innovations that drive the argument and act more effectively as filters are those that almost all civilizations eventually discover, where their discovery almost universally leads to disaster (Figure 55). Figure 55. In the short history of the “nuclear age,” we have come close to a holocaust several times. The Doomsday Clock tracks our proximity to Armageddon. Civilizations may become unstable and destroy themselves. This issue impacts the prospect of companionship and contemporaneous communication in space. Bostrom has said: “I hope that our Mars probes will discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be completely sterile.

Microbes that live inside rock or far below the surface of the ocean are immune to moderate changes in solar radiation since they live off geological energy. As the Earth becomes intolerably hot, we’ll have to develop Biospheres for the whole population—assuming humans persist that long. 13. Since 2012, the Doomsday Clock has stood at five minutes to midnight, uncomfortably close to disaster. The explanation associated with that judgment is worth quoting in full: “The challenges to rid the world of nuclear weapons, harness nuclear power, and meet the nearly inexorable climate disruptions from global warming are complex and interconnected.


Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World by Lesley M. M. Blume

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clean water, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Norman Mailer

., Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 405. “slippage”: John Hersey as quoted in “After Hiroshima: An Interview with John Hersey,” Antaeus Report, Fall 1984, 4. “100 seconds to midnight”: “Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight: 2020 Doomsday Clock Statement,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, John Mecklin, ed., January 23, 2020, https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/. “the most dangerous…” and “The world is…”: Dr. William J. Perry interview with Lesley Blume, January 31, 2020, and Dr. William J. Perry interview with Lesley Blume, February 5, 2019. a third supported [North Korea] strike…, “It’s our best…,” and “to end North…”: Alida R.

International treaties restricting such escalation are being abandoned. North Korea has been provocatively testing missiles while the United States occasionally rattles its saber in reply—but essentially looks the other way; Turkey is now vying to join the nuclear club. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nuclear watchdog group, has reset its Doomsday Clock—which gauges the world’s proximity to the possibility of nuclear war—to “100 seconds to midnight,” with midnight meaning nuclear apocalypse. The clock has never been that close to midnight—not even in 1953, “the most dangerous year of the Cold War,” says Dr. William J. Perry, former U.S. secretary of defense and chair of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors.

., 62 Daily Express (London), 26, 30–31, 46, 87, 131 Dawn Over Zero (Laurence), 99 “Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, The” (Stimson; Harper’s article), 152–57 Conant as adviser on, 151–53 on decision not to provide pre-deployment demonstration of bomb, 153 facts-only approach of, 152–53 as failing to address government cover-up, 157–58 guarded press response to, 157–58 on projected casualties from invasion of Japan, 155 Stimson’s reservations about, 151–52, 153 Truman and, 153 war portrayed as anonymous abstraction in, 158–59 dehumanization, of enemies, 13 genocide and, 182 democracy, 18, 24, 166 free press as vital to survival of, 182–83 Dick Cavett Show, The, 176 Diller, LeGrande A., 65–66 “Disease X,” see radiation poisoning Doomsday Clock, 13 East Asia Tin Works, 93, 100, 101, 113 Edwards, Ralph, 177 Einstein, Albert, 11, 12, 122, 183 on nuclear weapons, 147–48 Eisenhower, Dwight D., on use of nuclear weapons, 171 Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 43 Enola Gay, 133, 177 ethics, of atomic bomb use, 106, 130 Europe, 15, 17 aftermath of war in, 19 McCrary press junket in, 29 postwar reconstruction in, 43 Eyerman, J.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

James’s Church and clock tower from Brno’s central square, photographed in the early twentieth century 143 Assistant at the Greenwich observatory time-signal control desk, c. 1897 147 Officials investigating bomb damage at the Edinburgh observatory, 1913 160 Government sketch showing the scene of the Greenwich observatory explosion, 1894 170 Greenwich observatory official posing with gate clock, c. 1925 172 Crawford Market and clock tower, Bombay, in an early-twentieth-century postcard 175 Ethel Cain, photographed after winning the “Golden Voice” competition final, 1935 180 Family photograph of Mary Dixon (right) with her older sisters, Anne (middle) and Margaret (left), outside their home in Jarrow, 1930s 181 Watchmaker Daniela Toms adjusting a Charles Frodsham and Co. wristwatch, 2020 188 Efratom miniature atomic clock, backup for the two clocks installed on the NTS-1 satellite, made c. 1972 198 Thwaites and Reed rolling-ball clock, made c. 1972 202 Doomsday Clock, photographed on January 23, 2020, after having been adjusted to 100 seconds to midnight 204 Plutonium timekeeper buried at Osaka, 1970 215 About Time Introduction Korean Air Lines Flight 007, 1983 It is the early hours of a crisp Alaskan morning. Korean Air Lines’ Captain Chun Byung-in, First Officer Son Dong-hui and Flight Engineer Kim Eui-dong stride purposefully across the tarmac of Anchorage International Airport and climb into the cockpit of the Boeing 747 airliner that they are rostered to fly to Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport.

It was war that turned this idea from a civilian oddity into a military necessity, in both the First World War and the Second World War, with munitions factories in full production and fuel for lighting and power in short supply. Here, in the most widespread way, we see clocks enabling efficient wars and then reshaping the patterns of peacetime. Doomsday Clock, photographed on January 23, 2020, after having been adjusted to 100 seconds to midnight These and countless other examples simply remind us that technological development is often catalyzed, accelerated or shaped by war, and clocks sit at the heart of it all. Clocks have always been as much a class of military weapon as are bullets and bombs.

March, 150 Danse Macabre (Dance of Death), 60–61 da Silva, Pedro, 87 Daylight Saving Time, 73, 153–56, 203–4 death, hourglass as symbol of, 59–62 de Figueredo, Manuel, 87 Dengfeng observatory, 90–91 Dickinson, Henry, 137–38 Dingle, Anthony, 150 discipline, 41 Dixon, Mary, 177–78, 179, 181–82, 181 domestic clocks, 58 Dondi, Giovanni de, 17, 18, 32–33, 34 Dondi, Jacopo de, 17, 18 Doomsday Clock, 203, 204 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 154 du Bois, Joseph, 87–88 Dundas, James, 109 Dunkin, Edwin, 109 Dunt, Ian, 196 Edison, Thomas, 144 Efratom, 197–99, 198, 201, 204–5 Einstein, Albert, 156, 197, 198 electric time systems, 143–45, 143 time standardization and, 144–46, 148, 149, 153–54 empires astronomy and, 91–92 public clocks and, 14–15, 23–24 See also imperialism/colonialism; political identity and power engine clocks, 163–64 Eno, Brian, 219, 220, 221 Epistle of Othéa, The (Christine de Pizan), 56 European Southern Observatory, 86 Exposition Universelle, Paris (1878), 134–35 Factory Act (1844) (UK), 151, 152 Factory Act (1901) (UK), 152 faith astrology and, 34 astronomical clocks and, 27–29, 33, 34–38 automaton clocks and, 27–29, 33, 34–38, 37 Buddhism, 31 Christianity, 30, 34–35, 38–39, 40–41, 54 Hinduism, 31 Islam, 26–29, 27, 30 Judaism, 30–31 limitation of early clocks for, 31–32 political identity and power and, 43, 44, 45 Sikhism, 31 wasting time and, 40–41 Fallows, Fearon, 102, 103 Farage, Nigel, 195 Father Time, 59 Fayrer, James, 103 Ferguson, Adam, 141 fiber-optic time services, 79–81, 80 financial markets, 74–77 abstract nature of, 69–70 daylight saving and, 73 early securities exchanges, 67 fiber-optic time services and, 79–81, 80 intermediate roles in, 67 Royal Exchange, London, 70–71, 71 synchronization and, 72–73, 74, 75 time-stamping and, 75–77, 79, 81 trading methods, 74–75 Finer, Jem, 221 First Punic War, 9 Flamsteed, John, 88, 91 flying Dutchman, 106 Ford, Henry, 137–42 Francois, Mark, 195 Franklin, Benjamin, 41, 74, 164 free-pendulum clocks, 118–19 Gabelsperger, Anton, 88 Galileo satellite network, 205 globalization, 207, 209 Global Positioning System.


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Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Scientists have founded the major activist and watchdog organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, the Pugwash Conferences, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose cover shows the famous Doomsday Clock, now set at two and a half minutes to midnight.69 Physical scientists, unfortunately, often consider themselves experts in political psychology, and many seem to embrace the folk theory that the most effective way to mobilize public opinion is to whip people into a lather of fear and dread. The Doomsday Clock, despite adorning a journal with “Scientists” in its title, does not track objective indicators of nuclear security; rather, it’s a propaganda stunt intended, in the words of its founder, “to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality.”70 The clock’s minute hand was farther from midnight in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, than it was in the far calmer 2007, in part because the editors, worried that the public had become too complacent, redefined “doomsday” to include climate change.71 And in their campaign to shake people out of their apathy, scientific experts have made some not-so-prescient predictions: Only the creation of a world government can prevent the impending self-destruction of mankind.

World’s nuclear stockpile: Kristensen & Norris 2016a; see also note 113 below. 68. Nuclear winter: Robock & Toon 2012; A. Robock & O. B. Toon, “Let’s End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter,” New York Times, Feb. 11, 2016. History of nuclear winter/autumn controversy: Morton 2015. 69. Doomsday Clock: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2017. 70. Eugene Rabinowitch, quoted in Mueller 2010a, p. 26. 71. Doomsday Clock: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “A Timeline of Conflict, Culture, and Change,” Nov. 13, 2013, http://thebulletin.org/multimedia/timeline-conflict-culture-and-change. 72. Quoted in Mueller 1989, p. 98. 73. Quoted in Mueller 1989, p. 271, note 2. 74.

As early as 1945, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “Ultimate perils, however great, have a less lively influence upon the human imagination than immediate resentments and frictions, however small by comparison.”85 The historian Paul Boyer found that nuclear alarmism actually encouraged the arms race by scaring the nation into pursuing more and bigger bombs, the better to deter the Soviets.86 Even the originator of the Doomsday Clock, Eugene Rabinowitch, came to regret his movement’s strategy: “While trying to frighten men into rationality, scientists have frightened many into abject fear or blind hatred.”87 * * * As we saw with climate change, people may be likelier to acknowledge a problem when they have reason to think it is solvable than when they are terrified into numbness and helplessness.88 A positive agenda for removing the threat of nuclear war from the human condition would embrace several ideas.


What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

banking crisis, British Empire, Doomsday Clock, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, informal economy, liberation theology, mass immigration, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, oil shale / tar sands, operational security, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

The effects of global warming are going to come, but you can mitigate them, adjust to them, and prepare for them. The disaster is not imminent. In the case of nuclear weapons, on the other hand, a disaster is always imminent, and the likelihood of catastrophe is increasing. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently moved its doomsday clock up a couple of minutes to “five minutes to midnight.”2 Even conservatives like George Shultz and Henry Kissinger are warning that the nuclear threat is serious and getting more serious.3 In part, the threat comes from nuclear proliferation. But a lot of the cause of the proliferation is right here.

Jimmy Carter,” Boston Globe, 16 December 2006. 32 For background, see Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, chap. 9. 33 Yehoshua Porath, Ha’aretz (Tel Aviv), 25 June 1982, translated from the Hebrew edition. 34 Carter, Palestine, Appendix 7, “Israel’s Response to the Roadmap, May 25, 2003,” pp. 243–47. 35 See, among other examples, Patrick E. Tyler, “With Time Running Out, Bush Shifted Mideast Policy,” New York Times, 30 June 2002. 7. THREATS 1 Elisabeth Rosenthal and Andrew C. Revkin, “Science Panel Says Global Warming Is ‘Unequivocal,’” New York Times, 3 February 2007. 2 “‘Doomsday Clock’ Moves Two Minutes Closer to Midnight,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, media release, 18 January 2007, online at http://www.thebulletin.org/media-center/announcements/20070117.html. 3 George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” Wall Street Journal, 4 January 2007. 4 David E.


pages: 511 words: 148,310

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Robert Stewart [Scribner], 1993. Buhaug, Halvard, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch. “Contagion or Confusion? Why Conflicts Cluster in Space.” International Studies Quarterly 52, 2008: 215–33. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Doomsday Clock: Timeline. 2007. Accessed 6/5/09 at www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/timeline. Burnham, Gilbert, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts. “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey.” The Lancet 368, October 21, 2006: 1421–28. Cairns, Edmund. A Safer Future: Reducing the Human Cost of War.

Overall, writes journalist Gregg Easterbrook, “historians will view nuclear arms reduction as such an incredible accomplishment that it will seem bizarre in retrospect so little attention was paid while it was happening.” The numbers I just quoted came from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , a wonderful source of information. The Bulletin is also the creator of the famous “doomsday clock,” which claims to track the rising and falling danger level for nuclear war over the years. In 1968 the clock was set to a dramatic “seven minutes to midnight” as the Vietnam War and other Cold War–era wars raged. Over the years the hands of the clock moved forward and back as tensions rose and fell.

., the graph on p. 7 of UNHCR 2009. 14 Newly displaced. . . . return home: UNHCR data; UNHCR 2009: 19–21; see also Harff and Gurr 2004: xii. 14 Child soldier recruitment: Polgreen 2008c. 14 Global Peace Index: Accessed 6/8/10 at www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi-data/#/2010/scor/. 14 Brookings: Livingston et al. 2010. 15 Peace factors: Kriesberg 2007: 99–101, 113. 15 Intractable: Crocker, Hampson, and Aall 2005: 3–4. 16 Fatality totals by war: PRIO battle-death data, see Lacina and Gleditsch 2005; Bethany Lacina, personal communication, October 2010. 18 War on terrorism: Allison 2004. 18 Mind-boggling 30,000: Data from Federation of American Scientists and National Resource Defense Council, reported in New York Times, April 8, 2010. 18 Fallen in just twenty-five years: In addition, each side has several thousand weapons waiting in line to be dismantled. 18 U.S. tactical nuclear: Norris and Kristensen 2011. 18 Storage facilities: Norris and Kristensen 2009: 86. 18–19 Incredible accomplishment: Easterbrook 2003: 70. 19 Doomsday clock: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2007. 19 Total number of refugees: UNHCR 2000: 310. Higher numbers mentioned earlier include internally displaced persons. 19–20 Warned West Point cadets: Shanker 2011. 20 Global turmoil: Mearsheimer 1990: 6; Kaplan 1994; Brzezinski 1993; see also Cooper 2003: vii, 5, 25, 83. 20 Ghastly and persistent: Collier 2009: 7, 3, 4; O’Hanlon 2003: 2. 20 Mention that violence is decreasing: Crocker, Hampson, and Aall 2007; Brown 2007: 39; King 2007: 115; Gurr 2007: 133, 134, 151; Urquhart 2007: 265; O’Hanlon 2007: 323; Freedman 2007: 261. 20 No less dangerous: Solomon 2007: xi; Crocker, Hampson, and Aall 2007: 6. 21 Rape of Nanking: Chang 1997; Rummel 1991: 6–7; see also Slim 2008: 236. 21 Aerial bombardment: Slim 2008: 56–57. 21 Dresden. . . . raid: Taylor 2004: 448. 21 Fifty German cities. . . .


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

In spite of all the deletions, fact-checking, and monitoring systems they produce, social media will remain easy to exploit as a tool of disinformation as long as gathering subscribers is at the heart of the business model.197 * * * In what is certainly an ominous decision, but one with which it is hard to argue, in January 2020 the esteemed Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set their widely referenced Doomsday Clock (a symbol representing the risk of human-caused existential catastrophe) twenty seconds closer to midnight. Although they cited a number of factors, one that stood out was their concern about the toxic information environment in which we find ourselves, which they concluded had deteriorated to the point of being a public safety hazard.

Retrieved from https://faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/examining-trolls-polarization.pdf “Continued corruption of the information ecosphere … has heightened the nuclear and climate threats”: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. (2020, January 23). Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight. Retrieved from https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/ H.G. Wells described an imaginary “World Encyclopedia”: Wells, H. G. (1938). World Brain. Methuen. An imagined state of affairs where truth and democracy reigned supreme; this never actually existed: Farkas, J., & Schou, J. (2019). Post-truth, fake news and democracy: Mapping the politics of falsehood.

See also specific platforms by security agencies, 39, 41–45, 79 by social media, 13–14, 27–28, 63 Davidow, William, 100 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 183 DemDex, 60 Democracy in Retreat (Freedom House), 200 Deng Xiaoping, 216 deregulation, 49–50, 287, 288 Deudney, Daniel, 277, 279, 281, 303–304, 316 Dewey, John, 114, 263, 279 dezinformatsiya, 121–122 Digital Minimalism (Newport), 261 Digital Wellbeing (app), 261–262 dji Technology Co., 15, 177 Doctorow, Cory, 78, 313 Dominion Energy (VA), 238 Donaghy, Rori, 150 Doomsday Clock, 132 Dorsey, Jack, 93 DoubleClick, 60 Douek, Evelyn, 301–302 Draganfly, 193 drones, 14–15, 52, 177–178, 193 drt boxes (cell site simulators), 190–191 DuckDuckGo, 270–271 Duterte, Rodrigo, 120, 125–126, 192 Ecuador, 73–74 education (public), 316–318, 319–321 edunet, 107 Egelman, Serge, 65–66 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 59, 264 The Elements of Power (Abraham), 217 Empire and Communications (Innis), 22–23, 24 encryption, 69, 195–196, 198, 292–293, 323–324.


pages: 253 words: 84,238

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, carbon-based life, clean water, cloud computing, deep learning, different worldview, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Hawkins, PalmPilot, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, Turing test

Human intelligence, however, is not as benign. The possibility that human behavior might lead to our demise has been recognized for a long time. For example, since 1947 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has maintained the Doomsday Clock to highlight how close we are to making Earth uninhabitable. First inspired by the possibility that a nuclear war and resulting conflagration could destroy Earth, the Doomsday Clock was expanded in 2007 to include climate change as a second potential cause of self-inflicted extinction. Whether nuclear weapons and human-induced climate change are existential threats is debated, but there is no question that both have the potential to cause great human suffering.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

“Timeline,” Bull. Atomic Scientists, thebulletin.org/timeline; Science and Security Board, “It is two and a half minutes to midnight: 2017 Doomsday Clock Statement,” Bull. Atomic Scientists, Jan. 26, 2017, thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/Final%202017%20Clock%20Statement.pdf (accessed Apr. 27, 2017); Science and Security Board, “Statement from the President and CEO: It Is Now Two Minutes to Midnight,” Bull. Atomic Scientists, Jan. 25, 2018, thebulletin.org/2018-doomsday-clock-statement (accessed Jan. 25, 2018). 193.Bruce M. DeBlois, “The Advent of Space Weapons,” Astropolitics 1:1 (Spring 2003), 36. 194.Mizin, “Non-Weaponization of Outer Space,” 58. 195.Johnson-Freese, Heavenly Ambitions, 35; see also 119–32. 196.See, e.g., Outer Space, ed.

Once fifty countries have signed and ratified the treaty, it will become law.190 Writing for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists three weeks after Krepon’s blog post appeared, Ramesh Thakur, a former UN assistant secretary-general, characterized the global situation as precarious, especially in Asia: [U]nlike the superpower tête-à-tête of the last century, the second nuclear age features a multiplicity of nuclear powers with crisscrossing ties of cooperation and conflict, fragile command-and-control systems, critical cyber vulnerabilities, threat perceptions occurring among three or more nuclear-armed states simultaneously. . . . This is a situation that needs all the de-escalation measures it can get.191 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, by the way, is the home of the Doomsday Clock. The cover of its June 1947 issue featured a schematic clock set at seven minutes to midnight, indicating “the urgency of nuclear danger.” Since then, the clock’s hands have been moved twenty-one times in accordance with “whether events push humanity closer to or further from nuclear apocalypse.”

., 131, 134, 453n cyberspace, paired with space, 235, 236, 308, 319, 321 cyberwar, 235 da Costa, Emilia Viotti, 83 da Gama, Vasco, 81 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, 141, 142, 143, 456n daguerreotypes, 141, 142–44, 148, 456n Darius the Great, 119 Darwin, Charles, 97 d’Aurillac, Gerbert, 101, 441n da Vinci, Leonardo, 240 Davis, Jefferson, 124 dazzle camouflage, 172, 173–74, 259 dead reckoning, 77, 82, 86 Dean, Patrick, 292 “death rays,” 243–45 Dee, John, 106–7 Deep Impact mission, 207–8 Deep Impact (movie), 255 deep space, collaboration in, 398 de-escalation in space, focus on, 397, 531–32n Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 21, 154, 338–39, 345 Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), 158, 341–42, 501–2n Defense Satellite Communication System, 501n defense share, 452–53n Defense Support Program satellites, 158, 341 Democritus, 169 Descartes, René, 444n detection defined, 183–84 exoplanets, 175, 399 gamma rays, 199, 213–18 Hubble Space Telescope, detection story, 227–33 infrared light, 169–70, 199, 219–25 Jodrell Bank, detection story, 209–13 survival and conquest and, 171–72 X-rays, 180, 213, 225–27 deterrence diplomacy and, 312–15 and first use as option, 308, 309 through military strength, 305–6, 311–12, 316 by NATO, 305–6, 309–10 nuclear arsenals and, 237, 308, 309, 311–12 space weaponry and, 260, 299–300, 312 Dias, Bartolomeu, 81 differentiation, 384–85 Dingell, John, 418–19n diplomacy deterrence and, 312–15 Outer Space Treaty and, 274, 313, 382, 503n space diplomacy, 260–61, 312–13, 531n directed-energy weapons, 240–41, 242 see also lasers Dismantling the Empire (Johnson), 35 Dobrynin, Anatoly F., 292 Doel, Ronald E., 223 Dollond, John, 111, 130, 131 Dollond, Peter, 111, 130 Dolman, Everett C., 280–81, 330, 489n Doomsday Clock, 310–11 Dos Passos, John, 161 double concave lenses, 129 double convex lenses, 129 Dowd, Maureen, 36 Draper, John William, 144 Dr. Strangelove (movie), 300 Duffner, Robert W., 152–53 Dyna-Soar spaceplane, 279 Earth-observation satellites, see remote-sensing satellites Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company, 144 Eastman Kodak, 203, 205 Ebertin, Elsbeth, 57–58, 61 Echo communication satellite, 278 eclipses and ancient astronomy, 44–49, 423–24n cycle of lunar eclipses, 56 daguerreotype of solar eclipse, 144 effects on history, 45–49 evidence of Earth’s slowing rotation, 46 Eddington, Arthur, 400–401 Edison, Thomas Alva, 220 education in science and engineering decline in US share of degrees, 22, 31 reaction to Sputnik launch, 270, 490n Egypt ancient astronomy, 39, 40, 42 early ships, 68, 432n Nabta Playa, 42 pyramids at Giza, 42 solar calendar with 365 days, 40, 422–23n Einstein, Albert, 182, 215, 218 Eisenhower, Dwight D.


pages: 351 words: 96,780

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

Now Europe is internally at peace, just as North America has been since the native population was virtually annihilated, half of Mexico conquered, the US-Canada border established, and the phrase “United States” transformed from plural to singular 150 years ago. On a global scale, however, the practices, institutions, and dominant culture remain largely unchanged. The portents cannot be lightly dismissed. Chapter 4 Dangerous Times Concern about current threats is widespread and realistic. In February 2002 the famous “doomsday clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was advanced two minutes toward midnight, even before the release of the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy and Nuclear Posture Review, which elicited shudders worldwide. With different threats in mind, strategic analyst Michael Krepon regarded the final days of 2002 as “the most dangerous time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.”

See also multinational corporations Costa Rica, 178 Costigliola, Frank, 79, 80 Council on Foreign Relations, 123 counterinsurgency, 191 “counterterror,” 107, 189 crime, fear of, 117 crimes against humanity, 20–21 Cuba, 12, 97, 103, 122, 189 Angola and, 93–94 just war theory and, 202, 203, 205, 206 missile crisis, 14, 73–80, 83, 85, 87, 91, 129, 157, 187, 225 US campaign against, 14, 65, 78, 80–90, 93, 95, 202 Cubana airliner bombing, 85, 86 Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), 86 Czechoslovakia, 46, 68 Daalder, Ivo, 222 DARPA, 229 Dayan, Moshe, 184 Defense Department, 39, 41, 83 democracy, 4–8, 16 Algeria and, 115 control of public opinion in, 6–8 decolonization and, 29 election of 2000 and, 139 fascism and, 67, 69 human rights and, 129–39 Indonesia and, 163 Iraq and, 141–43 Middle East and, 106, 129, 136–37, 179 neoliberalism and, 6–7, 138–39 Nicaragua and, 103 peace and, 62, 71–72 US and, 10, 69, 214 war on Iraq and, 33, 36, 130–36 Dewey, John, 15 dictators, US support for, 112–15 Diego Garcia, 162 Dimona reactor, Israel’s, 25 Dole, Bob, 112 “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003,” 27 Domínguez, Jorge, 83 Dominican Republic, 46 “doomsday clock,” 73 drug war, 59–61, 117–18 Dulles, Allen, 65, 81, 103 Dulles, John Foster, 64, 163 Duvalier, “Baby Doc,” 112 Duvalier, “Papa Doc,” 82 East Asia, 148, 153, 155 Eastern Europe, 137, 145–48 East Timor, 22, 53–54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 130, 142 Eban, Abba, 118 “Economic Charter for the Americas,” 66 economic nationalism, 66 economic policies and conditions.


pages: 395 words: 103,437

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

McMaster said in early December at an event in Washington that the North Korean threat is “increasing every day” and “there’s not much time left.” Time seemed to be running out. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced in January that “it is now two minutes to midnight,” the closest the world has been to midnight since 1953 at the height of the Cold War. In its statement about the Doomsday Clock, a symbol of concerns among scientists about the potential for nuclear annihilation, the Bulletin explained that its reason for moving the clock closer to midnight was the “hyperbolic rhetoric and provocative actions” by North Korea and the United States that “have increased the possibility of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.”

McMaster said in early December: Alex Pappas, “H. R. McMaster: Potential for War with North Korea Increases ‘Every Day,’ ” Fox News, December 2, 2017. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: @BulletinAtomic, January 25, 2018, https://twitter.com/​BulletinAtomic/​status/​956550260318285824. In its statement: Barbara Goldberg, “ ‘Doomsday Clock’ Closest to Midnight Since Cold War over Nuclear Threat,” Reuters, January 25, 2018. Credible media reports: Zachary Cohen, Nicole Gaouette, Barbara Starr, and Kevin Liptak, “Trump Advisers Clash over ‘Bloody Nose’ Strike on North Korea,” CNN, February 1, 2018. The threat of a conflict: Maria Perez, “Chilling Video: Child Placed in Storm Drain during Hawaii Missile Scare,” Newsweek, January 15, 2018.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

The threat of nuclear war, of course, remains the main existential threat. The US and North Korea continue a tit-for-tat war of words (more pathetically, via Twitter), while Russian and NATO fighter jets crisscross their way through Syria in support of their respective dueling factions. But the Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical (and admittedly somewhat gimmicky) device conceived by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1947 to show the risk of human extinction by nuclear war, now fully incorporates climate change into its consideration as well. To say nothing of the technologies that are currently in their adolescence, like artificial intelligence, which may pose just as great a long-term danger to our existence if they are not harnessed correctly, which is virtually guaranteed if they are developed for profit rather than a more sustainable form of human progress.

To say nothing of the technologies that are currently in their adolescence, like artificial intelligence, which may pose just as great a long-term danger to our existence if they are not harnessed correctly, which is virtually guaranteed if they are developed for profit rather than a more sustainable form of human progress. The 2017 Doomsday Clock statement made this point, reinforcing the argument made in Chapter One that institutions need to be ahead of the curb in addressing potential threats: Technological innovation is occurring at a speed that challenges society’s ability to keep pace. While limited at the current time, potentially existential threats posed by a host of emerging technologies need to be monitored, and to the extent possible anticipated, as the 21st century unfolds.58 Pinker has downplayed this, claiming that “if the hands of a clock point to a few minutes to midnight for seventy-two years, then something is wrong with the clock”,59 a statement which after reading the opening section of this chapter should sound profoundly naive.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

This leads to a constant cycle of credit booms and bust. In the second half of the twentieth century, credit money gradually became the primary form of money, leading to an explosion of debt. In 1947 the directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago created the doomsday clock. The minutes to midnight represent the time remaining to catastrophic destruction (midnight) of the human race from global nuclear war. In 1989 Seymour Darst, a New York real estate developer, created the financial equivalent. He installed the national debt clock—a billboard-size digital display on Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) in Manhattan, New York, that constantly updates to show the current U.S. public debt and each American family’s share of it.

It consisted of a computer linked to a stockpile of hydrogen bombs, programmed to detonate them and bathe the planet in nuclear fallout at the signal of an impending nuclear attack from another nation. In Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, there is speculation about whether the Russians possess this technology. Currently, the doomsday clock reads around 5 minutes to midnight. In 2008, as the global financial crisis gripped the world, the financial equivalent of the doomsday machine—an unstable system of money and unsustainable levels of debt—reached midnight and imploded. Money Is Nothing At each step of the transition from commodity to paper to credit, money became more unreal, and detached from the real goods and services that money can be exchanged for.

See also exotic products AIG, 230-234 arbitrage, 242 central banks, 281-282 deconstruction, 235-236 first-to-default (FtD) swaps, 220-221 Harvard case studies, 214-215 hedging, 216-217 Italy, 215-216 Jerome Kerviel, 226-230 managing risk, 124 markets, 235, 334 municipal bonds, 211-214 price movements, 210-211 risk, 218-219 design of, 225 Fiat, 222-223 Greece, 223, 225 sale of to ordinary investors, 332-333 sovereign debt, 236-238 TARDIS trades, 217-218 TOBs (tender option bonds), 222 Derman, Emanuel, 309 Derrida, Jacques, 236 Descartes, René, 228 Detroit, 42 Deutsche Bank, 79, 195, 272, 312 Devaney, John, 255 di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 353 digitals, 211 Dillion Read, 201 Dimon, Jamie, 283, 290 dinars, 21 Diners Club, 71 Dirac, Paul, 104 dirty bombs, 26 disaster capitalism, 342 discrete time intervals, 121 dismal science, 102-104 dispersion swaps, 255 distressed debt trading, 242 distributions, normal, 126 diversification, 122-124 dividends, 119 Dixon, Geoff, 156 documentation requirements, 181 DOG (debt overburdened group), 161 dollars American, 21-22, 28, 87 aussies, 21 kiwis, 21 Zimbabwe, 23 domain knowledge, 64 domestic corporate profits, United States, 276 Dominion Bond Rating Service, 283 doomsday clock, 34 Dorgan, Bryan, 67 Douglas, Michael, 167, 310 Dow 36,000, 99 Dow 40,000: Strategies for Profiting from the Greatest Bull Market in History, 97 Dow 100,000, 97 Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), 89, 97, 126 Dr. Doom, 95 Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 35 Drexel Burnham Lambert, 140, 230 Drexel Harriman Ripley, 144 Drexel system, 151-152 Druckenmiller, Stanley, 261 Drucker, Peter, 63 drunk trading, 40 Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), 82-83 Dublin as a financial center, 83 Duncan, Richard, 235 Dunninger, Karl, 355 Duquesne Capital Management, 261 Durand, David, 116, 119 DVT (deep vein thrombosis), 166 Dynamite Prize in Economics, 304 E early return of capital, 156 earnings General Electric (GE), 61 loans, 70 Eastern Europe, reintegration of after fall of Berlin Wall, 295 Eaton Leonard LBOs, 150 eBay, 345 Ebbers, Bernie, 54 economic growth, risk, 295-296 economic rents, 276-277 economics, definition of, 102 Economics of Happiness, The, 364 Economist, The, 62, 77, 327 Edens, Wesley R., 239 education, finance careers, 308-313 bonuses, 317-318 compensation, 313-320 efficient market hypothesis (EMH), 118, 303 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 186 Einarsson, Sigurdur, 275 Einhorn, David, 256, 259, 274 Einstein, Albert, 90, 126, 128 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 294 El-Dorado economics, 84-85 Electric & Musical Industries, 157 Elias, David, 97 Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, 313 Eliot, T.S., 321 Ellis, Bret Easton, 313 embedded loss leverage, 193 EMEA Trading in Local Currency, 318 emerging markets, 124 EMI Group, 157, 162 emotional market hypothesis, 303 Emperor Franz Joseph I, 163 employee benefits, 47 energy, 251 engineering, financial, 55-57 engineers, financial, 308 Engle, Louis, 131 Enron, 49, 55-56, 154, 283, 307, 313 Enron, 288, 307, 328 Enterprise Fund, 145 equilibrium, markets, 327 equities, 55 equity, 119 long-short funds, 240-242 private, 155, 164 failures, 162-163 infrastructure, 158 public sector services, 161 tranches, 170, 192 Equity Office Properties, 155 Ernst & Young, 244 EU (European Union), stabilization funds, 354 Eurex, 227 European debt crisis, 357-359 euros, 21 event-driven funds, 242 Ewing, J.R., 147 ex ante (expected risk), 246 ex post (based on actual risk), 246 excess spreads, 169 exchanges, money, 23-24 Exor, 222 exotic products, 73-74 expensive capital, reduction of, 75 expiry, 120 exploding ARMs, 183 exploitation, 38 exports from China, 85 exposure to catastrophic weather events, 251 F Fair Isaacs Corporation, 181 fallen angels, 144 falsifying financial statements, 289-291 Fan, Henry, 218 Fannie Mae, 339 fascism, 29 fat tails, 126 fata morgana, 130-131 Faust, 36 FCIC testimony, Alan Greenspan, 304-305 Fear of Flying, 73 fear of loss of status, 43 FEB Trucking, 150 Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC or Freddie Mac), 180 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 179 Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA or Fannie Mae), 179 Federal Reserve, 97, 316 Federated Department Stores, 150 fees consulting, 316 derivatives, 215 hedge funds, 245 leveraged buyouts (LBOs), 141-143 Feldstein, Martin, 316 Ferguson, Charles, 316 Ferguson, Niall, 87, 156 Ferguson, Nicholas, 163 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 65 Fiat S.P.A.


pages: 449 words: 127,440

Moscow, December 25th, 1991 by Conor O'Clery

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, haute couture, It's morning again in America, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine, The Chicago School

They were invited by the Soviet government which no longer exists. The meeting goes ahead, with Yeltsin’s people, two days later, to the relief of the somewhat bewildered executives. With the end of the Soviet Union, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago move the hands of the Doomsday Clock back to seventeen minutes before midnight. Six years before, when Gorbachev took office, the big hand stood at three minutes to Armageddon. (In January 2010, with new tensions among the world’s nuclear nations and in light of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the hands are moved forward again to six minutes to midnight.)

Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR Corruption and economic reform See also Party privilege Cuenca, José Currency controls Dacha, presidential De Gaulle, Charles Declaration of Sovereignty of the RSFSR Demonstrations Diplomats Doomsday Clock Drozdov, Valery Eastern Europe Economic reform and corruption and five-hundred-day plan and Gorbachev and organized crime and shock therapy and Yeltsin See also Perestroika Economic union Esalen Institute Esalen Soviet American Exchange Program Estonia. See also Baltic republics Falin, Valentin Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB) Five-hundred-day plan.


Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Fear could induce paralysis, as Ogburn noted, but it could also energize political activism in behalf of international control of atomic weapons and a “One World” organization to back it up. The United Nations, it was hoped, could fill the bill. Among the most committed One World advocates were atomic scientists themselves, veterans of the Manhattan Project who founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and set its doomsday clock at seven minutes to midnight. Their method was plain: they wanted to “scare the pants off” the American people. “Only one tactic is dependable—the preaching of doom,” one scientist advised. “Anything else induces yawns.” The aim of the Bulletin, said the physicist Eugene Rabinowitch, was “to preserve our civilization by scaring men into rationality.”

Reagan was nearly persuaded, but in the end he simply could not give up his quixotic dream of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Despite warming relations between the superpowers and a few substantial arms-control treaties, the dream of abolition—or even significant cuts in the nuclear arsenals—disappeared. As a result, the nuclear arms race has continued. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set its doomsday clock to one hundred seconds before midnight, closer than ever due to deteriorating U.S. relations with Russia and China, the scrapping of arms-control agreements, and the renewed determination of nuclear powers—led by the United States—to modernize their nuclear arsenals. Of course, the latest technological developments remain shrouded in secrecy, but we can be sure that artificial intelligence remains near the center of strategic research, and with it the possibility of caprice and mistake—human or post-human.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

But, along with these hopes, twenty-first century technology will confront us with new global threats - stemming from bio-, cyber- and environmental­ science, as well as from physics - that could be as grave as the bomb. The Bulletin's clock is now closer to midnight again. These threats may not trigger sudden worldwide catastrophe - the doomsday clock is not such a good metaphor - but they are, in aggregate, disquieting and challenging. The tensions between benign and damaging spin-offs from new technologies, and the threats posed by the Promethean power science, are disquietingly real. Wells' pessimism might even have deepened further were he writing today.

D . 1 3 7 Brock, ).C. and McClain, C.R. 2 1 1 Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider report (2000) 18 Brooks N. 283 Brown, D.E. 312 Index 5 34 brown dwarf stars 39 collisions 40 Bruce, G . B . et a!. 386, 387 bubonic plague 290, 291, 294, 295 Buchanan, M., Ubiquity 181, 182 Buddhism messianism 77 post-millenialism 76 premillenialism 75 Buehler, R. et a!. 1 08-9 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, doomsday clock vii, viii Bunn, M. 423 Burnet, F . M . , Virus as Organism: Evolutionary and Ecological Aspects of Some Human Virus Diseases 304 Burton, I. et al. 93 business world, perceived risks 168-9 busy conditions, increase of contamination effect 103 bystander apathy 109- 1 1 calibration o f confidence intervals 1 0 7 California, earthquake insurance 173 Cambodia, totalitarianism 517 Cameron, G . 406 Campanian eruption 209 Campbell, K. et a!.

105, 106 deterministic systems, probability estimates 6 developing countries, vulnerability to biological attack 473-4 developmental period, artificial intelligence 322 diagnosis, infectious disease 469-70 Diamond, ) . 66, 357 Dick, S.). 1 3 3 die rolling, conjunction fallacy 96-7 diffusion of responsibility 1 1 0 dinosaurs, extinction 5 1 disaster policy 372-5 disconfirmation bias (motivated scepticism) 99, 100 discount rates, global warming 192-3, 198, 200 disjunctive probability estimation 98 dispensationalism 74 disruptive technologies 432 distribution of disaster 367-9 distribution tails 1 5 6-7 DNA synthesis technology 458-60 increasing availability 450 outsourcing 465 risk management 463-4 dollar-loss power of disasters 368-9 Doomsday Argument 129-3 1 doomsday clock, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists vii, viii Index dotcom bubble burst, insurance costs 1 7 3 Drake equation 2 14-1 5 Drexler, K . E . 3 3 1 , 485, 486, 488, 495 Engines ofCreation 499-500 Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation 501-2 Drosophila melanogaster, frequency-dependent balancing selection 63 dual-use challenge, biotechnolo gy 45 1-2, 455-8 Dubos, R., Man Adapting 304 duration, totalitarianism 506-10 537 education, role in nuclear disarmament 440-1 The Effects ofNuclear War, Office of Technolo gy Assessment ( 1 979) 389, 401 Elbaradei, M. 401 El Chich6n eruption ( 1982) effect on climate 270 effects on ocean productivity 2 1 1 electroweak theory 354-5 El Nino Southern Oscillation 278 emer gin g diseases 16, 82 emissions targets 277 dust showers, cosmic 2 3 1-3 emissions taxes 194-6, 197, 198 DWI M (Do-What-1-Mean) instruction emotions, artificial intelli gence 320-1 empty space transitions 355-7 322-3 Dynamics of Populations of Planetary Systems, Kneevic, Z. and Milani, A. 2 3 5 dys genic pressures 6 2 Dyson, F , scaling hypothesis 43-4, 4 5 early warnin g systems nuclear attack 384 terrorist-initiated false alarms 426-7 Earth ejection from solar system 35-6 end of complex life 8 fate of 34-5, 44 magnetic field reversals 250 variation in eccentricity 239 Earth-crossin g bodies, search for 226 earthquake insurance, California 173 earthquakes 7 risk mitigation 372 energy power 368 Earth's axis, wobbles 268 Earth system models of intermediate complexity (EM !


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

By 2008, however, the energy scientist Vaclav Smil could offer a positively sunny estimate that the chance of even a World War II–scale conflict (killing 50 million people) before 2050 was well under 1 percent, and in January 2010 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand of its celebrated “Doomsday Clock”—indicating how close we stand to Nightfall—back from five minutes to six minutes before midnight. The second priority is to slow down global weirding. Here things are going less well. In 1997 the world’s great and good gathered at Kyoto to work out a solution, and agreed that by 2012 greenhouse gas emissions must be cut to 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels.

Zheng 2005. 604 “great drain robbery”: cited from Kynge 2006, p. xiii. 605 “a threat to world peace”: Ipsos-Reid poll (April 2005), cited from “Balancing Act: A Survey of China,” The Economist, Special Report, March 25, 2006, p. 20 (available at http://www.economist.com/specialreports). 605 threat to global stability: Gallup poll (October 2007), cited from “After Bush: A Special Report on America and the World,” The Economist, March 29, 2008, p. 9 (available at http://www.economist.com/specialreports). 605 “PEOPLE AGONIZED”: China Daily headline (May 1999), cited from Hessler 2006, p. 20. 605 “strategic conspiracy”: Chinese Communist Party resolution (2004), cited from “Balancing Act: A Survey of China,” The Economist, Special Report, March 25, 2006, p. 15 (available at http://www.economist.com/specialreports). 605 “it is more likely”: Graham and Talent 2008, p. xv. 606 “No physical force”: Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (1910), cited from Ferguson 1998, p. 190. 606 “international movement of capital”: Jean Jaurès, cited from Ferguson 1998, p. 190. 606 “must involve the expenditure”: Prime Minister Edward Grey in conversation with the Austrian ambassador to Britain, July 1914, cited from Ferguson 1998, p. 191. 606 “total exhaustion”: Grey, letter to the German ambassador to Britain, July 24, 1914, cited from Ferguson 1998, p. 191. 607 “I do not know”: Albert Einstein, interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism (April—May 1949), cited from Isaacson 2007, p. 494. 608–609 estimates: Richardson 1960; Smil 2008, p. 245, http://www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/overview. 609 “guys with gross obesity”: Anonymous official in the Indian Foreign Ministry, cited from “Melting Asia,” The Economist, June 7, 2008, p. 30 (available at http://www.economist.com). 609 “The first era”: T. Friedman 1999, p. xix. 609 “Globalization 3.0”: T. Friedman 2005, p. 10. 610 “The only salvation”: Albert Einstein, New York Times, September 15, 1945, cited from Isaacson 2007, pp. 487–88. 610 “If the idea”: Albert Einstein, comment on the film Where Will You Hide?

item_id=2252&issue_id=54; “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2008 (available at http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120036422673589947.html); Perkovich and Zaum 2008; Sagan and Miller 2009–2010. Decline of arsenals: Norris and Kristensen 2008, 2009a, b, 2010. Doomsday Clock: http://www.thebulletin.org/content/media-center/announcements/2010/01/14/it-6-minutes-to-midnight. Reducing consumption: McKibben 2010, Wells 2010. Kyoto Protocol: text at http://unfccc.int/kyoto-protocol/items/2830.php. Data on emissions since 1990: http://unfccc.int/files/inc/graphics/image/gif/total_excluding_2008.gif; http://co2now.org/.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

* * * ■ ■ ■ ■ In the early 1950s, the United States emerged from the Second World War as a new global force. The decade before, America dropped the first (and hopefully only) atomic bombs in history, on Japan. They unleashed unprecedented power that became even scarier after the Soviet Union got the bomb, too. As the two nations faced off, the newly invented Doomsday Clock—created to reflect mankind’s proximity to self-annihilation—read just two minutes from the apocalypse. The Defense Department asked a group of scientists and mathematicians at an elite think tank called the RAND Corporation to come up with a strategy for what the United States should do in this new nuclear age.


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

The tipping point for Marks came in the summer of 2017, when researchers in Oregon led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov became the first American group to successfully edit a gene in a human embryo using CRISPR. Mitalipov insisted he had no plans to use gene editing to produce actual human beings. But it was hard to ignore the possibility that, in the biological equivalent of the Doomsday Clock, we had moved a big step closer to the alarming prospect of designer babies. The scientific possibilities of CRISPR seemingly know no bounds. By harnessing the components of a prehistoric bacterial immune system, scientists have developed a remarkable molecular cursor that can scan the 3 billion letters that make up the human genome for a specific sequence, cut it, then repair or change it.

See also Genome sequencing automated sequencing, 17–18, 279 CRISPR sequencing and, 41–42 invention of, 129, 155 new technology for, xv, 4–5, 19–21, 31–33, 41–42, 73, 209, 353–354 of newborn baby, xv progress in, 17–21, 31–33, 72–73, 209, 212, 279–281, 353–354 sponsored sequencing, 281 views on, xiv–xv DNA surgery, 63–75 Dobbs, David, 147 “Don’t Edit the Human Germline,” 197 Doomsday Clock, 5 Double helix. See also DNA anniversary of, 362 assembly of, 18, 60, 123–125, 154–155 description of, 68 discovery of, 7, 18, 123–130 glimpse of, 125–126 rungs of, 280 strands of, 26–28, 28, 100, 124–130, 327–328, 333–334 structure of, 26–28, 28, 47–48, 100, 124–130, 227, 327–328, 333–334, 355 symmetry of, 47–48 unzipping, 26–28, 28, 130, 327–328, 367 Double Helix, The, 47–48, 108, 126 Doudna, Andrew, 10 Doudna, Jennifer, x–xii, xvi, 7–10, 13, 21, 29, 46–67, 70–74, 84, 87–106, 170–189, 200–205, 220–224, 232–237, 240–243, 247, 253–254, 264, 273, 302, 324–326, 330, 335, 346, 363–367 Dow-DuPont, 186, 314 Down syndrome, 209, 322, 358 Dozy, Andrée, 155 Dragon’s Island, 124 Drayna, Dennis, 90 Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), xiii, 138, 175–176, 363 Dulbecco, Renato, 135 DuPont, 45, 186, 314 Dwarfism, 359 E E. coli, 22, 33–39, 44, 55–56, 67, 69 Eckert, Maria, 60 Economist, xi, xii Edgware General Hospital, 216 Edison, Thomas, 97 Editas Medicine, 11, 13, 89, 169, 171–174, 182, 186–188, 308, 336, 361 Edwards, Robert, 15, 216–218, 232–233, 260–261 Efcavitch, Bill, 212 eGenesis, 281–283, 318 Eggleston, Angela, 328 Egli, Dieter, 215, 258, 276 Einstein, Albert, 7, 97 Eisen, Michael, 93 Ekker, Stephen, 240 El País, 31 Elf, Johan, 27 Eli Lilly, 110 Eliava, George, 162 Eliava Institute, 163 eLife, 74, 87, 88 Embryo experiments, ix–xi, 4–6, 14–15, 193–206, 211–229, 238, 243–246, 253–258, 261–276, 338–341, 348–355 Embryo fertilization, 194–198, 214–215, 222, 338–340, 351–356.


pages: 622 words: 169,014

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

At the conference, he proposed what he felt was a practical test for recognizing creative youngsters, but no one else took it seriously. Two days after returning home to West Newton, Massachusetts, Asimov was asked to write an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the journal best known for its Doomsday Clock, a visual representation of the risk of nuclear war that currently stood at seven minutes to midnight. Asimov, who was deeply concerned by the bomb, decided to return to the idea that he had raised in New York. He went to work, typing away in his attic office, which had become a refuge from his unhappy personal life—his wife was talking openly about divorce, and he was worried about their son David, who seemed to have nothing in common with his famous father.

., 289 De Mille, Richard, 289, 290, 292 “Derelicts of Ganymede, The” (Campbell), 56 “Design Flaw” (Campbell), 315, 472n “Design Flaw” (Correy), 472n Desilu Studios, 373 Destination Moon (movie), 255, 273, 281, 336 DeWolf, Ronald (“Nibs” Hubbard), 83, 130 dianetics, 17–19, 267–95, 328–30 abortion and, 254, 269, 277, 278 announcement of, 257–58 auditing process, 254 Campbell’s traumatic memory of birth, 18–20, 251 “A Criticism of Dianetics,” 256–57, 261 first use of term, 255, 261 generating publicity for, 267–74 Hubbard’s new mental therapy, 237–39, 249–58 influences on, 259–62 in Kansas, 328–29 past lives and, 289 terminology, 253–54, 261, 329 “Terra Incognita: The Mind,” 258–59 trademark dispute, 329–30 virality of, 272–73 “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science” (Hubbard), 267–68, 271–72 Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (Hubbard), 9, 17, 257, 261–64, 267, 268–70, 272 Dick, Philip K., 355–56, 384 Dick Cavett Show, The, 396–97 Dickson, Gordon R., 375, 378 Dimension X (radio show), 475n Dockweiler, Harry, 103 Doc Savage (magazine), 74 Don Isidro (cargo ship), 160 “Doodad” (Bradbury), 183 Doomsday Clock, 3 Door into Summer, The (Heinlein), 337–38, 479n Doubleday, 223, 348 “Double Minds, The” (Campbell), 67 Double Star (Heinlein), 337 Downs, Hugh, 381–83 dowsing, 355, 484n Doyle, Arthur Conan, 5 Dressler, Frank, 290 Duke University, 55–56, 57 Dune (Herbert), 7, 357–58 Dunn, Lucius C., 132 Durant, Will, 37, 269 Earhart, Amelia, 46 Easy-Bake Oven, 335 Ebert, Roger, 376 Edsall, USS, 160 “E for Effort” (Sherred), 248 Ehrenhaft, Felix, 446n Einstein, Albert, 11, 52 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 339 “Elder Gods, The” (Burks), 121 Eleanor Hotel, 224 “Electronic Siege, The” (Campbell), 56 electroshock therapy, 19, 209–10, 272–73 “Elimination” (Campbell), 65–66 Ellis, Carleton, 66–67 Ellis Island, 48 Ellison, Harlan, 7, 320, 346, 347–48, 367–68, 371, 399 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 71, 137, 349 e-meter, 329, 332 Empire (Simak), 473n Empire State Building, 199, 448n Empire Strikes Back, The, 124 Enchanter (ship), 333, 334–35 End Is Not Yet, The (Hubbard), 236–37 “Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline, The” (Asimov), 221–22, 267, 319–20 End of Eternity, The (Asimov), 343 End Poverty in California (EPIC), 109–10 “engram,” 253–54 ENIAC, 261 “Escape, The” (Campbell), 64 Esserman, Paul, 400–401, 405 Evers, Medgar, 2 “Evidence” (Asimov), 208, 220 “evil eye,” 56 Excalibur (Hubbard), 89, 237, 238, 249–50, 260 Expanded Universe (Heinlein), 386 Explorers Club, 130–31, 258 Explorers Journal, 258–59 Exploring Tomorrow (radio show), 324, 475–76n Fantastic Voyage (movie), 348 “Farewell to the Master” (Bates), 121 Farnham’s Freehold (Heinlein), 340, 363 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 288–89, 291–92, 349, 394 Fear (Hubbard), 129–30 feedback, 260 feminism, 12, 365–66 Fermi, Enrico, 81 Fidczuk, Richard, 426n Finagle’s Law, 29–30 Final Blackout (Hubbard), 117, 129–30 “First Contact” (Jenkins), 245 Forbidden Acres (Russell), 87–88 Ford Foundation, 311 Forever War, The (Haldeman), 379 “Forgetfulness” (Campbell), 66 Fort, Charles, 77, 87, 145 “Fortress in the Sky” (Hubbard), 236, 340 For Us, the Living (Heinlein), 111–12, 118, 225 Foster, Alan Dean, 359 “Foundation” (Asimov), 139–41 Foundation’s Edge (Asimov), 400 Foundation series (Asimov), 10, 139–41, 167, 207, 220, 222, 275, 343, 349, 400 “Four Little Ships” (Jenkins), 194 Frankenstein (Shelley), 5 Freas, Frank Kelly, 310–11, 378, 416n Freemasons, 39 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 276, 278, 279 “Frictional Losses” (Campbell), 65 Fromm, Erich, 338 Fromme, Lynette “Squeaky,” 483n “Frozen Hell” (Campbell), 67–68, 69, 425–26n Fuller, Clement, 475n Future History (Heinlein), 113, 114, 118, 142, 384 Futurians, 100, 102–4, 103, 117–18, 133–34, 141, 144–45, 181, 223 Futurians, The (Knight), 99 Gable, Clark, 286 Gaiman, Neil, 7 Galactic Patrol (Smith), 77–78 Galaxy, 283–85, 343, 358 Game of Thrones (TV show), 7 Garby, Lee Hawkins, 30 Gardner, Martin, 324, 475n Garrett, Randall, 320, 321–23, 348, 366, 405 General Semantics, 110–11, 244, 255, 259–60, 280, 307 genetics, 357, 361–62 George Washington University, 45, 46 Germer, Karl, 233, 234 Gernsback, Hugo, 6, 30, 50, 57, 60, 75–76, 100 Gerrold, David, 372 Gibbon, Edward, 139 Gillespie, Jack, 103 Gingrich, Newt, 12, 415n Ginsberg, Allen, 332 Gittleson, Yvette, 241 Glory Road (Heinlein), 340 Gnome Press, 283 Gods Themselves, The (Asimov), 398 Godwin, Tom, 320 Gold, Evelyn, 283 Gold, Horace, 283–84, 343, 466–67n Goldberger, Joe, 161–62 golden age of science fiction, 7, 414n “Goldfish Bowl” (Heinlein), 146–47 Goldsmith, Cele, 348 Goldstone, Lou, 231 Goldwater, Barry, 341, 388 Goodavage, Joseph F., 484n Göring, Hermann, 8 gravity gauge, 236, 340, 456n Gray, Arthur Z., 305–6 Grazer, Brian, 405 Great Depression, 57, 63, 102–3, 274 Greater New York Science Fiction League, 99–100, 102 Great Exclusion Act, 108–9 Greek mythology, 25 Green, Joseph, 376 Greenberg, Martin, 283 Greene, William Chace, Jr., 33 “Green Hills of Earth, The” (Heinlein), 226–27, 456n Green Lantern, 276 Gripsholm, MS, 172–73 Gross, Henry, 316 Grow Old with Me (Asimov), 220–21, 223 Gruber, Frank, 83–84 Guam, 44–45 “guk,” 287 “Gulf” (Heinlein), 229–30, 275 Haldeman, Joe, 365, 379 Hall, Desmond, 77 Hamilton, Edmond, 427n Hammond, James, 376 Hammond, Margaret, 376 hard science fiction, 64, 414n Harrison, Harry, 363, 375, 378, 387 Harrison, Laura, 20 Hartwell, Dickson, 242–43 Have Space Suit—Will Travel (Heinlein), 338 Hawks, Howard, 299–300 Hayakawa, S.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

It is not easy for our planet to support billions of people. This is the juggling act of a finely tuned global economy that moves food and goods across continents and oceans. If anything were to happen to that global economy, billions could die of starvation. The small postapocalyptic population would then slow down the hands of the doomsday clock. Human extinction might be put off a long time, but billions would have died. Wells’s estimated 1 percent per year chance of societal collapse is greater than the chance that an average home will burn down this year. We take that seriously enough to buy insurance. Parents worry about unsafe car seats and vaccination side effects and doctored Halloween candy.


pages: 326 words: 88,968

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

There are many imaginable dystopian scenarios such as these. The truth is that it is impossible to adequately address these future problems from the perspective of the present day. In every age, we have faced frightening new challenges. In 1953, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists infamously declared the nuclear doomsday clock to be at a mere “two minutes to midnight.” And yet, despite the nuclear arms race and the fears it engendered for decades, no nuclear war erupted, and the Cold War was formally declared over by 1991. With new technologies come new fears, followed by new solutions. Yes, we make mistakes along the way.


pages: 404 words: 95,163

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

But there’s one word that often gets overlooked in all this talk of an impending apocalypse – relevance. The most important rule in retail is being relevant to customers. If you can’t deliver on the basic principles of giving customers what they want or standing out from the competition, then you don’t stand a chance. For these retailers, yes, the Doomsday clock is ticking. For those willing to embrace change, however, this is a fantastically exciting time to be in retail. The future is fewer, more impactful stores. The future is offering shoppers a more blended online and offline experience. And the future is excelling at WACD: What Amazon Can’t Do.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Snow, Herman Kahn, Carl Sagan, and Jonathan Schell) wrote that thermonuclear doomsday was likely, if not inevitable.137 The eminent international studies scholar Hans Morgenthau, for example, wrote in 1979, “The world is moving ineluctably towards a third world war—a strategic nuclear war. I do not believe that anything can be done to prevent it.”138 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, according to its Web site, aims to “inform the public and influence policy through in-depth analyses, op-eds, and reports on nuclear weapons.” Since 1947 it has published the famous Doomsday Clock, a measure of “how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction—the figurative midnight.” The clock was unveiled with its minute hand pointing at 7 minutes to midnight, and over the next sixty years it was moved back and forth a number of times between 2 minutes to midnight (in 1953) and 17 minutes to midnight (in 1991).

Nonetheless, for all the differences between the American “mad cowboys” and the European “surrender monkeys,” the parallel movement of their political culture away from war over the past six decades is more historically significant than their remaining differences. IS THE LONG PEACE A NUCLEAR PEACE? What went right? How is it that, in defiance of experts, doomsday clocks, and centuries of European history, World War III never happened? What allowed distinguished military historians to use giddy phrases like “a change of spectacular proportions,” “the most striking discontinuity in the history of warfare,” and “nothing like this in history”? To many people, the answer is obvious: the bomb.

dominance and anarchy and the brain as cause of war circuit in brain gender differences in group (tribalism) hierarchies of and information introduction of concept and nationalism dominance (cont.) and sadism and self-esteem and social identity as zero-sum game dominance hierarchy Dominica Donohue, John Doomsday Clock dopamine Dostoevsky, Fyodor Douglas, William O. Douglass, Frederick Dover Doctrine Dowd, Maureen Doyle, Arthur Conan Draco Draize procedure drones drugs: decriminalization of 1960s trafficking War on Drugs Druids Dubner, Stephen Duck Soup (film) Duckworth, Angela dueling Dukakis, Michael Dulles, John Foster Dumas, Alexandre père Durham, Margaret Dworkin, Andrea Dylan, Bob dynasties, see Age of Dynasties; monarchy Eastern Europe abortions in and democracy and genocide violence against women in wars in East Timor Easy Rider (film) Eckhardt, William Eden, William education and civil war and democracy IQ tests method and content of ego depletion egotism Egypt, ancient Egypt, modern Eichmann, Adolf 80:20 rule Eighty Years’ War Einstein, Albert Eisenhower, Dwight D.


pages: 369 words: 105,819

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

On militarism, he wants to raise the military budget, already over half of discretionary spending, leading right now to confrontations which could be extremely hazardous (Newman 2016). The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists regularly brings together a group of scientists, political analysts, other serious people, to try to give some kind of estimate of what the situation of the world is. The question is: How close are we to termination of the species? And they have a clock, the Doomsday Clock. When it hits midnight, we are finished. End of the human species and much else. And the question every year is: How far is the minute hand from midnight? At the beginning, in 1947, the beginning of the nuclear age, it was placed at seven minutes to midnight. It has been moving up and back ever since.


pages: 427 words: 111,965

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, climate change refugee, cross-subsidies, decarbonisation, Doomsday Clock, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Gregor Mendel, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Medieval Warm Period, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, uranium enrichment, Y2K

“At last here is a clear and readable account of one of the most important but controversial issues facing everyone in the world today. If you are not already addicted to Tim Flannery’s writing, discover him now: this is his best book yet.” —Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize&nd;winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel “Of the doomsday clocks ticking toward midnight, climate change is the most fearful…One cannot do better than read Flannery’s eloquent and authoritative account in The Weather Makers. Understanding is the first step toward salvation.” —John Polanyi, Nobel Laureate “Finally, a book about a global crisis that people can understand.


pages: 448 words: 116,962

Singularity Sky by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological constant, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Extropian, Future Shock, gravity well, Higgs boson, Kuiper Belt, life extension, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, quantum entanglement, skinny streets, technological singularity, uranium enrichment

Presently, they shut down and coasted, retaining only enough reaction mass for terminal maneuvering when they got within ten seconds of the enemy. Ahead of the Lord Vanek, the glinting purple crosses of the unpowered torpedoes fell forward toward the enemy. A minute later, Gunnery Two spoke up. "I've lost missile one, sir. I can ping it, but it doesn't respond." "Odd—" Mirsky's brow furrowed; he glanced at the doomsday clock. The battlecruiser was closing on the destination at a crawl, just 40 k.p.s. The enemy was heading toward them at better than 200 k.p.s., decelerating, but their thrust was dropping off—if this continued, closing unpowered at 250 k.p.s., their paths would intersect in about 500 seconds, and they'd be within missile-powered flight range 200 seconds before that.


pages: 465 words: 124,074

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Public opinion polls conducted in the United States characteristically found very substantial percentages opining that the next world war would occur within 25 years.2 With some desperation, schemes were formulated at the war’s end to try to invalidate such gloomy sentiments. Some Western scientists, apparently consumed with guilt over having participated in the development of a weapon that could kill with much-heightened effectiveness, helped found the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945. It soon sported its “doomsday clock” on the cover, suggesting that there was hope of preventing Armageddon, but only if we were quick about it. The clock has remained poised at a few minutes before midnight ever since, from time to time nudged slightly one way or the other by various events. (Amazingly, in 2006 the Bulletin launched a subscription campaign boldly and unapologetically built around the slogan “Dispensing facts instead of fear for over sixty years.”)


pages: 542 words: 132,010

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist. In January 2007, a group of leading scientists, including astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, announced that the hands of the “Doomsday Clock”—a creation of the board of directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—would be moved forward. It was “five minutes to midnight,” they said. A key reason for this warning was the fact that, according to the statement of the board of directors, “global warming poses a dire threat to human civilization that is second only to nuclear weapons.”


pages: 1,123 words: 328,357

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

At Washington, Reagan and Gorbachev signed away a whole category of nuclear weapons in the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty – the first time the superpowers had ever agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals. Here was a significant step in defusing the Cold War, making it less likely that a nuclear conflict would break out. Atomic scientists put back their celebrated ‘Doomsday Clock’ to six minutes before midnight, instead of three. And on 31 May 1988, when Reagan was asked in Red Square whether he still felt the USSR was an ‘evil empire’, he replied ‘I was talking about another time, another era.’[12] Reagan was moving on – and so was Gorbachev. Six months later, the dramatic address at the UN on the morning of 7 December was for the Soviet leader a ‘watershed’ moment.

Matlock Jr Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended Random House 2004; James Graham Wilson The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagament, and the End of the Cold War Cornell UP 2014; Svetlana Savranskaya & Thomas Blanton (eds) The Last Superpower Summits: Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush – Conversations that Ended the Cold War CEU Press 2016 (hereafter TLSS); Jonathan Hunt & David Reynolds ‘Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow, 1985–1991’ in Kristina Spohr & David Reynolds (eds) Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 Oxford UP 2016 pp. 151–79. On the Doomsday clock, see Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists thebulletin.org/timeline Back to text 13. Anatoly Chernyaev – Notes from a Meeting of the Politburo 31.10.1988 Archive of the Gorbachev Foundation Moscow (hereafter AGF) Digital Archive Wilson Center (hereafter DAWC); Mikhail Gorbachev Memoirs Bantam 1997 p. 459; Politburo meeting 24.11.1988, printed in V Politbyuro TsK KPSS.


pages: 492 words: 153,565

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Also per author interview with David Albright in January 2012. 35 Albright, Peddling Peril, 200–1. 36 The UN Security Council applied economic sanctions against Iran in December 2006, and in March 2007 it voted unanimously to freeze the financial assets of twenty-eight Iranians linked to its nuclear and military programs. 37 Just when matters with Iran were at their most tense, North Korea tested a nuclear device. The deteriorating nuclear situation on multiple fronts prompted the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on January 17, 2007, to move the minute hand of its famous Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight. Instead of seven minutes to Doomsday, it was now set to five. 38 Due to export controls and other difficulties producing the rotors from maraging steel, as the centrifuge design required, Iran had abandoned production of the IR-2s in 2002. But Iranian scientists modified the design to substitute a carbon fiber rotor instead and sometime after 2004 resumed production. 39 Collins and Frantz, Fallout, 259. 40 “Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Address at the 2007 Herzliya Conference,” January 24, 2007.


pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

And thinking that might well be the last sunset I saw” (Ellsberg, 2017, pp. 200–1). 54 Daniel Ellsberg’s estimate in light of all the recent revelations is “Far greater than one in a hundred, greater that day than Nitze’s one in ten” (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 220). 55 I was particularly surprised in January 2018 to see the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists setting their famous Doomsday Clock to “2 minutes to midnight,” stating that the world is “as dangerous as it has been since World War II” (Mecklin, 2018). Their headline reason was the deepening nuclear tensions between the United States and North Korea. But the clock was intended to show how close we are to the end of civilization, and there was no attempt to show how this bears any threat to human civilization, nor how we are more at risk than during the Cuban Missile Crisis or other Cold War crises. 56 The United States still has 450 silo-based missiles and hundreds of submarine-based missiles on hair-trigger alert (UCS, n.d.). 57 This is related to the “pacing problem” considered by those who study the regulation of technology.


pages: 631 words: 171,391

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs

air freight, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, global village, Google Earth, Herman Kahn, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, yellow journalism

Khrushchev, representing the rival ideological forces that had taken the world to the edge of nuclear annihilation, stepped back from the abyss. If the Cuban missile crisis was the defining moment of the Cold War, Black Saturday was the defining moment of the missile crisis. It was then that the hands of the metaphorical Doomsday Clock reached one minute to midnight. The day began with Fidel Castro dictating a telegram urging Khrushchev to use his nuclear weapons against their common enemy; it ended with the Kennedy brothers secretly offering to give up U.S. missiles in Turkey in exchange for a Soviet climbdown in Cuba. In between these two events, Soviet nuclear warheads were transported closer to Cuban missile sites, a U-2 spy plane was shot down over eastern Cuba, another U-2 strayed over the Soviet Union, a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine was forced to the surface by U.S.


pages: 546 words: 176,169

The Cold War by Robert Cowley

Able Archer 83, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transcontinental railway

A final point emphasizes the awesome threat posed by ICBMs, as well as their central place in the deterrent balance of terror at the strategic heart of the Cold War: Both the Soviet Union and the United States were so terrified of the threat of an ICBM attack and, paradoxically, so determined to preserve the stabilizing deterrent power of the threat that—at least so far as the public record shows—no missile was ever launched from an operational ICBM silo, nor was an ICBM ever fired with a live nuclear or thermonuclear warhead aboard. The War Scare of 1983 JOHN PRADOS For four decades and more, we lived in perpetual fear of war. The nuclear doomsday clock appeared to be forever stuck at one minute to midnight, the witching hour for the world. Several times the long hand moved forward by several alarming seconds. To put the feeling another way, it was like walking around with collective aneurysms in our brains that could burst all at once and kill without warning.


pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

But the most dramatic change was the American public’s attitude about nuclear war. Before Cuba, it was common US wisdom that another world war was in our future, and that armed conflict with the Soviet Union, likely nuclear, was certain. For thirty years, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was published with a doomsday clock set at minutes to midnight; in 1960, C. P. Snow called atomic war a mathematical certainty, and many others, including Albert Einstein, had a similar outlook. In 1959, 64 percent of Americans said “war, especially nuclear war” was their country’s biggest problem . . . but by 1965 it was 16 percent.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

(The Valley tech community had been so delighted by their heroic portrayal in the book that they reclaimed the label as an honorific, and Stewart Brand began holding an annual “Hackers Conference” to celebrate the movement they had forged.) An outlaw programmer was the hero of William Gibson’s sci-fi novel Neuromancer, a cult bestseller published right around the same time. Even run-of-the-mill geeks got the girl in teen hits Sixteen Candles and Revenge of the Nerds. As the Doomsday Clock ticked closer to midnight, it wasn’t surprising that so many dreamed of a Hollywood ending where these hackers used tech to make peace instead of war.5 STAR WARS Silicon Valley was ground zero for the Jedi Knights of the computer world, and not just because Apple had portrayed it that way during the 1984 Super Bowl.