Future of Life Institute Profile picture
Aug 6, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read Read on X
FLI proudly announces the winners of the 2022 Future of Life Award.

They are @John_Birks, Paul Crutzen, Jeannie Peterson, @AlanRobock, Carl Sagan, Georgiy Stenchikov, Brian Toon and Richard Turco.

Find out more about the winners here: futureoflife.org/future-of-life…

Hear their story👇
All eight of these heroes win the Future of Life Award for their roles in discovering and popularising nuclear winter.

We hope that drawing attention to this work will help to refocus attention on nuclear weapons, as governments meet to at the #NPTRevCon this month. (2/6) https://futureoflife.org/fu...
Nuclear winter is the severe and prolonged global climatic cooling likely to result from a nuclear war. Masses of soot & smoke, lofted into the stratosphere by firestorms, would envelop the planet, blocking the sun.

Blocked sunlight = agricultural failure = global famine. (3/6) https://futureoflife.org/fu...
Decades after the reduction of nuclear arsenals at the end of the Cold War, Nuclear Winter has unfortunately faded from public consciousness. But by remembering the work of the pioneers of this field, we can better inform future decisions and hold our leaders accountable. (4/6) https://futureoflife.org/fu...
After all, it was the bilateral scientific acceptance of nuclear winter - brought about by this year's winners - which helped persuade both Gorbachev and Reagan to reduce their nuclear arsenals in the first place.

Nuclear winter changed the world.

It can do so again. (5/6)
We invite you to celebrate the heroes of The Story of Nuclear Winter.

And we urge you to share this story, and in so doing help to give it a happy ending.

A nuclear winter would impact all of us.

So let's make sure this is a story mainly of something which DIDN'T happen. (6/6) https://futureoflife.org/fu...

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More from @FLIxrisk

Mar 22
One year ago today we released an open letter calling for a six-month pause on giant AI experiments.

A lot has happened since then - far more than we could have predicted.

🧵 Some highlights from the past year of unprecedented momentum and progress addressing risks from AI 👇
The EU AI Act passed.

Following years of work by 🇪🇺 lawmakers, CSOs, AI experts & many others, this comprehensive, landmark set of laws has set a precedent for governments around the world to follow - prioritizing public safety and responsible innovation over corporate profits.
The UK AI Safety Summit.

The first of several to come, the Summit brought together world leaders, experts & stakeholders to discuss AI risks.

It even produced the Bletchley Declaration, with 28 governments agreeing to address AI's catastrophic risks.
gov.uk/government/pub…
Read 17 tweets
Mar 29, 2023
📢 We're calling on AI labs to temporarily pause training powerful models!

Join FLI's call alongside Yoshua Bengio, @stevewoz, @harari_yuval, @elonmusk, @GaryMarcus & over a 1000 others who've signed:
futureoflife.org/open-letter/pa…

A short 🧵on why we're calling for this - (1/8)
With more data and compute, the capabilities of AI systems are scaling rapidly.

The largest models are increasingly capable of surpassing human performance across many domains.

No single company can forecast what this means for our societies. (2/8)
Consider an example: You can use an AI model meant to discover new drugs to create pathogens instead.

This model will promptly generate over 40k pathogens - including VX, the deadliest nerve agent ever - in roughly six hours. (3/8)

nature.com/articles/s4225…
Read 8 tweets
Aug 24, 2022
Tensions between China and the US have flared up again over the past few weeks.

Are these states paying enough attention to the likely consequences of a conflict? (1/5)

on.ft.com/3PLbtQV
A recent war-game conducted by the @CNASdc demonstrated just how rapidly a conventional conflict between the US and China could escalate into a nuclear war. (2/5)

foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…
Even a 'limited' nuclear conflict would affect billions around the world.

Read @bryanrwalsh's coverage of a study led by Lili Xia and Future of Life Award winner @AlanRobock on the devastating consequences of nuclear winter, on @voxdotcom (3/5).

bit.ly/3CwOfej
Read 5 tweets
Mar 28, 2022
It seems harder than ever to retain positive visions for our world's future.

But this is precisely why it matters more than ever that we create and share these visions.

The FLI Worldbuilding Contest deadline is in less than 3 weeks, on April 15th. (1/5)

worldbuild.ai
The contest welcomes worldbuilds that are aspirational. But when we specified that the worldbuilds must be positive, we were under no illusions about how unlikely it seems, today, that in 20 years' time, things will somehow be any better.

Yet this can be your motivation. (2/5)
Remembering that we also stipulated these builds be 'plausible', in your timelines and answers to our prompts, you will need to think about how the world of 2045 might have (temporarily, at least) overcome recurrent human problems like war, the nuclear risk, and disease. (3/5)
Read 5 tweets
Mar 10, 2022
We have posted a lot in the past about nuclear close-calls, when a misunderstanding, a malfunction or a misreading brought us to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe. Many of these near-misses occurred at times of heightened tension, times like now. (1/6)

futureoflife.org/background/nuc…
Take the Suez Crisis, 1956. British and French forces had attacked Egypt at the Suez Canal.Soviet leaders had proposed combining forces with the U.S. to stop these smaller powers, even warning London and Paris that conventional missiles were now pointing at them.(2/6)
Then NORAD received intelligence of the following:

1. unidentified aircraft flying over Turkey, with Turkish air force on alert
2. 100 Soviet MIG-15s flying over Syria
3. a British Canberra bomber shot down over Syria
4. the Soviet fleet moving through the Dardanelles.

(3/6) 1951 British Canberra PR9 B...
Read 6 tweets
Mar 9, 2022
After the USSR collapsed, the fear of nuclear war faded to something of a distant memory in the public consciousness.

The return of nukes to headlines may have come as something of a shock. Here are some things worth remembering, as we come back to terms with this threat. (1/11)
Firstly, when we think of Cold War paranoia, we usually imagine this boiled down to fearing, 'what if they get us before we get them?'. In other words, there was a presumption that if one's country could only pre-empt the enemy's strike, then the issue would be solved. (2/11)
But in the 1980s, climatologists worked out that the aftermath of any substantial nuclear war was potentially destructive to all life on earth, not just the direct targets. As Carl Sagan put it, any nation launching a strike thereby commits suicide, due to nuclear winter. (3/11) Image
Read 11 tweets

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