Our mission is to ensure the survival of humanity

Our focus areas

Our organization and research agenda currently consists of three approaches:

Mapping the space

The first approach will be to map the space of different existential risks and strategies through literature reviews and conversations with domain specific experts.

Developing strategies

The second approach will be to develop strategies based on a cross-disciplinary approach grounded in mathematics, philosophy and simulation programming.

Broadcasting our results

The final approach will be to broadcast information to a wider audience and set up strategic alliances with other groups working on existential risk mitigation.
Why strategy you might ask.
"If strategy is not the best thing to do, how could you know this but by means of strategy?"

In the past, existential risk strategy has been useful in both determining the critical areas in which resources should be allocated as well as flagging dangerous projects. Strategy scales well insofar as simply conveying the idea is sufficient to cause people to update.

The construction of a strategy group also compounds well in that strategy can be applied to the construction of the strategy group itself.

Of the various paths we could follow to reduce existential risk, strategy is also the most self-correcting: if strategy is not the best thing to do, how could you know this but by means of strategy?

Our team

Our team currently consists of the following individuals:

Justin Shovelain

Justin Shovelain is the founder of the quantitative long term strategy organization Convergence. Over the last seven years he has worked with MIRI, CFAR, EA Global, Founders Fund, and Leverage, and done work in EA strategy, fundraising, networking, teaching, cognitive enhancement, and AI safety research. He has a MS degree in computer science and BS degrees in computer science, mathematics, and physics.

Dr Andrew X Stewart

Andrew has a background in machine learning, computational neuroscience, policy and AI. He has worked in the neural and genetic origin of schizophrenia and published work on classifying human neuroimaging data. His Ph.D was at University of Edinburgh in Neuroinformatics and he went on to work writing modelling and stats software with the Brain Research Imaging Centre, and is a Center for Applied Ra tionality bootcamp alumnus.
Current research focus is on strategies for future tech development and use of data science and machine learning to improve lives.

Kristian Rönn

Kristian has a background in mathematics, philosophy, computer science and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of several NGOs and companies. Between 2013 and 2014 he worked as an project manager at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. He has been heavily involved in the Effective Altruism Movement since 2010 by working for several organisations in the space on issues ranging for existential risk to charity evaluations.
Research focus: compiling big data from sources such as cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) multi-regional input-output analysis (MRIO), life-cycle assessments (LCA), with machine learning to automatically compute the best spending strategies to maximize utility and minimize harm.

Claire Abu-Assal

Claire has studied cognitive science at UC Berkeley. She is also highly interested in psychology, mathematics, and computer science. Recently, she has been working on measuring the effects of existential risk interventions, and has been involved in the design of this group.

Ozzie Gooen

Ozzie has done engineering work at Yahoo!, DEKA Research and Development, and Grand Rounds. He cofounded Bow Labs Inc, a company that created multiple profitable applications. Later he worked at 80,000 Hours, an Oxford affiliated nonprofit that made expected value estimates of ethical careers. He also cofounded .impact, an online collective that has helped organize hundreds of international volunteers to make projects on the topic of Effective Altruism.
Ozzie Gooen is a software entrepreneur in San Francisco. He’s the founder of Guesstimate, a spreadsheet that performs Monte Carlo simulations in the browser.

Daniel Kokotajlo

Daniel is a philosophy doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill; his experience includes working for the Global Priorities Project and City Year. He is interested in all ethical and factual matters pertaining to the long-run fate of humanity. He intends to specialize in anthropics, decision theory, and formal epistemology.