Patrick Collison#81
I’m excited to share that I’ve joined @WorksInProgMag as an editor, where I’ll be focusing on AI and European progress.
At Works in Progress, I’ll focus on a topic that is both important and underrated: how Europe should grapple with the changes brought by artificial intelligence.
Europe is in a challenging position. But I also believe it is crucial that Europe remains able to influence how the coming years and decades play out. It is one of the world's most liberal regions, and has been central for the world's moral progress.
Right now, the number of people working on European AI policy is really low. Many things need to happen for the continent to be adequately equipped for what's to come: data center construction, ensuring frontier AI adoption in governments, better risk-tracking across European capitals, and a broader policy agenda that ensures Europe can capture more of AI’s surplus.
I’ve recently started writing up my thoughts on AI in Europe at http://simongrimm.substack.com, with a much larger piece coming out soon.
Works in Progress is an amazing home for this type of work. It has published many canonical pieces on big challenges of our time, economic stagnation first among them. But it has also covered lead elimination, far-UVC for pandemic prevention, organ donation, and many other important ideas. If one wants to paint a picture of how Europe can succeed in the age of AI, Works in Progress is the ideal place to do so. (If you haven't subscribed yet, do it; you'll be in great company.)
Joining Works in Progress also means leaving the US, and the project I’ve spent the past three years working on: the Nucleic Acid Observatory, now SecureBio Detection. At MIT and SecureBio, we built a pathogen early warning system that I’m incredibly proud of. The people I was lucky to work with in Cambridge were among the smartest, most mission-driven, and most focused people I’ve ever spent time with. The impact SecureBio is having on biosecurity is immense, and we are all safer for it.
I’m proud to be joining Works in Progress as the next step in my career, and I’m looking forward to working with such talented colleagues during such a turbulent, fast-moving time.
