During peacetime

During “peace time”, the foresight team prospects for potentially catastrophic events, or generally highly significant geopolitical/technological events. Some examples to look out for could be the invasion of Ukraine, India/Pakistan skirmishes, North Korea tests, or Sam Altman joking that “AGI has been achieved internally”.

To add some structure, forecasters meet once a week to exchange impressions and events they are keeping track of, and draft minutes. These minutes were initially sent to a private mailing list of early alert supporters but are now being shared more widely. The team is currently led by itself, under a rotating leadership model.

The foresight team is aided by some custom infrastructure that continuously searches news for a series of keywords, feeds them to an LLM model, and emails forecasters if they are deemed to be sufficiently urgent. However, this nascent infrastructure is relatively ad-hoc and underbaked, and could still be much improved. In the short term, we’ll integrate GDELT.

In the event of a catastrophe

In the event of a potentially upcoming catastrophe, the foresight team alerts the rest of the ALERT team, then the public, and proceeds to work with the ALERT team to discern future scenarios and their probabilities.

Team composition

So far, the composition of the team is anonymous, but draws from the Samotsvety forecasting group. The team is not currently looking for new members.