Ben Harack studies the potential for AI to trigger a world war and how to prevent that from happening. He is currently pursuing a DPhil in International Relations at Oxford University.
Previously, he was the co-founder of the Vision of Earth project, the primary author of Ruling Ourselves, and one of the engineers behind the Human Diagnosis Project — a worldwide effort led by the global medical community to build an open intelligence system that maps the steps to help any patient.
Ben is also an advisor to Convergence, a research nonprofit working on existential risk strategy. He holds a master’s degree in physics and bachelor’s degrees in computer science, mathematics, physics, and psychology.
Selected works:
- Robert Trager, Ben Harack, Anka Reuel, et al. International Governance of Civilian AI: A Jurisdictional Certification Approach.
- Harack, B., Laskowski, K., Bailey, R., Marcotte, J., Jaques, S., Datta, D., and Kuski, S., 2017. Ruling ourselves: The deliberate evolution of global cooperation and governance. New Shape Library, Global Challenges Foundation.
- An interdisciplinary effort to present a new macrostrategy for tackling the intertwined problems of technological existential risk and global governance.
- Semifinalist for the international New Shape Prize, a $5 million USD prize for ideas that could improve global governance and help avoid existential catastrophes.
- New Shape Forum participant at the invitation of the Global Challenges Foundation.
- Laskowski, K., Harack, B., Watson, A., 2019. Governing the emerging risk posed by asteroid manipulation technologies. Effective Altruism Global, San Francisco, 21–23 June.
- Examines how asteroid deflection technologies pose a threat to humanity and how they can be safely governed
- Cooper, D.R., D’Anjou, B., Ghattamaneni, N., Harack, B., Hilke, M., Horth, A., Majlis, N., Massicotte, M., Vandsburger, L., Whiteway, E. and Yu, V., 2012. Experimental review of graphene. ISRN Condensed Matter Physics, 2012. doi:10.5402/2012/501686
- A widely-cited review of the experimental properties of graphene.
Selected blog posts:
- Proposing an International Governance Regime for Civilian AI
- What will cause human extinction: Natural disaster or human folly?
- Our unfriendly universe: Risks of human extinction by nature
- Humanity must flourish to survive
- Occupy heaven: The vast potential of humanity if we can safeguard our future
- Cooperate or perish: Minimal levels of collaboration needed to save the world
- The moral imperative of averting existential risks
- Know your enemy: Saving the world requires humble diligent thought
- Know yourself: Cognitive biases undermining the study of existential risks
- The cooperation possibility frontier
Current projects:
- Developing a bargaining model of technological existential risk that demonstrates that under most conditions, rational actors are incentivized to negotiate and compromise rather than race toward dangerous technologies.
- Designing international institutions which can govern civilian AI (see report) and (more challenging) military AI.
- Understanding how “social dilemmas” in game theory (such as the prisoner’s dilemma) are different under existential risk than under other kinds of risk.
- Exploring the dynamics of technology races in the Modeling Cooperation project.
- Examining whether the advent of truly “existential” concerns during the Cold War (due to the idea of nuclear winter, etc.) led to a shift in rhetoric, behavior, and policy for the superpowers that differed substantially from their behavior under mutually-assured destruction.
Contact
Interested in learning more about the above projects? Ben can be contacted at Ben.Harack@gmail.com