"Daddy, I'm going to die! I don't want to die!" My five-year-old daughter is screaming this over and over while we are in our house's bomb shelter. Outside, there was a boom that shook the whole apartment. It was like nothing I have ever experienced. I learned afterward that it was a Hamas missile that landed …

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I have been a technologist from an early age. When I was eleven, I was already writing complicated programs in a language called mIRCScript. What fascinated me about computers is their ability to calculate at a speed and precision beyond that of humans, or even the sum of all humans at the same time. Computers are …

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One of the biggest problems I have personally struggled with is how to talk about AI safety without coming off as a madman. To the uninitiated this community comes off like a cult. I've heard it called the rapture of the nerds. Yet AI Safety is also reasonable. It is based on rationality. Even the extreme proposition …

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I've been struggling lately with this idea that there is many qualities which are good but in tension with each other. Peace is contrary to justice Ambition is contrary to gratitude And obviously to get goodness, sometimes one has to invite badness. The famous "risk vs reward" calculation. It feels to get …

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We are people who can ponder the infinite and yet we live less than a century. We live on a speck of dust in a universe that is billions of light years wide. People spend some of the best years of their lives working in depressing beige cubicles that are more like cages, forced to work on things that are inane and …

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Each soldier is unique through the eyes of someone who looks up to them. Bauch dayan emet. May the holy memory of my father Daniel Ben-Joseph be a blessing for you and for the world. The two lessons I want you to learn from my father is to not take life for granted and to love your children. My father did both ten …

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TLDR: Combine Gattica, WALL-E, Blade Runner, and Her WARNING: Contains mild spoilers. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro touches on the nature of emotion, cognition, loss and loneliness all under the backdrop of a futuristic society. Ishiguro articulates a future where artificial intelligence augments or replaces the …

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This is some scratchpadding that happened after talking with a friend of mine which I'm making public because why not? (Famous last words.). This is a fantasy league document (think Etz, the fantasy AI lab) and shouldn't be taken seriously. The future of healthcare relies on a few foundational technologies. These …

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A colleague of mine mentioned the term "public health intelligence". I rather like it. I interpret this term to mean: the practice of intelligence toward the reduction of pandemic risk and the improvement of public and individual health. Throughout tens and thousands of years of human history, a nation, a …

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When I was newly minted teenager, my parents sent me to live on a kibbutz in Israel for a summer. This was a kibbutz that had a massive dairy farm. I remember sleeping in barracks close to a huge group of cows who would moo all day and night. It smelled like shit - all the time. Yet it was the happiest experience of my …

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In the beginning there was nothing. And God spoke into the void: Let there be light! And there was light. What language did God speak? What was the first language ever spoken? In Jewish tradition, God's will is expressed through language. God spoke the entire Cosmos into existence. The nothing that predated reality was …

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Climate change can be solved. In fact: all problems which are solvable can be solved with the application of sufficient intelligence. I am against the idea of carbon sequestration for sequestration's sake. Carbon sequestration is the removal and storage of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It's like lighting money on …

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There is no such thing as biology. There is no such thing as chemistry. There is no such thing as physics. Biology is just a word that humans invented so that they can say they are "biologists" on their resume and get jobs as "biologists". Underlying all of science is mathematics. Underlying all …

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I have a friend who ponders human existential risks (x-risks) for a living. He proposed that biothreats are challenging to model as an x-risk. A virus that can kill off all of humanity is highly implausible, since you can literally put people in a box or on an island. But, a virus that would kill or maim the vast …

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How is like to be an illegal immigrant everywhere, including your own homeland? Jews between 1939 and 1948 (the official founding of Israel as an independent state) largely had to sneak into Israel. The White Paper of 1939 greatly limited Jewish immigration into the Land of Israel. Jews who did not leave Europe by 1939 …

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