Launch Sequence

AI advances over the next few years could catalyze a new golden age of discovery and abundance. To realize this potential, we must solve two broad problems.

First, these benefits may not come by default or quickly enough, given existing commercial incentives. This may be because a particular application would create public goods, which markets tend to undersupply, or because a research direction is high-risk and requires large upfront investments.

Second, rapidly improving AI capabilities will likely come with risks that industry isn't sufficiently incentivized to solve. Private incentives to adequately invest in defensive technologies could be dwarfed by the scale of the risks new AI technologies could impose on the public.

The Launch Sequence is a collection of essays, written by expert authors, describing concrete but ambitious projects to use AI to accelerate scientific breakthroughs, and to accelerate the development of defensive technologies to increase societal resilience in the face of intelligence too cheap to meter.

We'll publish The Launch Sequence on the IFP website and as a physical book.