Going Through Changes
The Next Frontier is shifting.
When I started this blog, I thought I knew what I wanted to write about. Like most people who begin publishing their thoughts online, I had strong opinions about specific things and assumed those opinions deserved their own corner of the internet. What I've discovered since then is that the most interesting questions don't respect the boundaries I tried to draw around them.
The Evolution
Over the past months, I've found myself increasingly drawn to concepts and thoughts which are important, interesting and relevant, yet also outside the scope I had initially envisioned. This corresponds to the various shifts my career has taken over the same time frame. I worked with the UK AISI on a project developing new infrastructure for evaluating protocols for controlling unaligned frontier LLMs. I went to Uppsala, and presented work on the risks and potential of advanced AI in nuclear verification. I presented a white paper on using AI to forecast the risk of coups at a workshop on crisis computing. And now I am in London, on a 3 month research assignment working to evaluate the scheming propensity of LLM agents. But more importantly, I talked to a lot of people regarding various topics, and I have come to realize that limiting my scope to AI gives an incomplete picture of the world. We need to have conversations that go beyond these thin lines, and explore the reality of a deeply interconnected world.
That's what The Next Frontier is becoming: a space for exploring the technologies, risks, and ideas shaping our trajectory as a species, with particular attention to the dangerous convergences others miss. Yes, that means writing about AI safety and nuclear risks, the two existential challenges that are my primary focus and increasingly intertwined as AI systems are integrated into defense infrastructure. But it also means examining things like historical developments that shaped the world, information warfare, biotechnology governance, and the broader challenge of managing technologies that evolve faster than our institutions can adapt.
The scope is admittedly ambitious. But I'd rather be honest about the full range of what interests me than artificially constrain the conversation. Some weeks that might mean a technical analysis of machine learning vulnerabilities in early warning systems. Other weeks it might mean exploring what medieval guilds can teach us about platform governance, or why the Montreal Protocol offers lessons for AI coordination. The thread connecting it all is a focus on understanding and navigating humanity's most consequential challenges.
Along with this evolution in focus, I'm moving The Next Frontier to Substack. Substack offers several advantages for what I'm trying to build. Substack allows me to build a community with ease, both through long-form content but also through notes and chats. Since I don’t plan to have paid subscriptions in the near future, Substack is also cheaper for me to maintain. The prevalence of Substack means subscribing is much more convenient for existing users and not a significant additional burden for those who aren’t. Most importantly, Substack has become where serious, long-form analysis lives online. The platform has cultivated an audience that actually reads, thinks, and engages with complex ideas, which is exactly the kind of community these topics require.
What to Expect
The new incarnation of The Next Frontier will feature:
Regular Analysis – Weekly essays exploring specific risks, technologies, or governance challenges. These will aim for the sweet spot between academic rigor and accessibility, with enough depth to be useful for specialists but enough clarity for generally informed readers.
Synthesis Pieces – Monthly long-form articles that connect insights across disciplines. These might explore how nuclear verification protocols could inform AI governance, or what the history of environmental regulation suggests about managing emerging technologies.
Policy Briefs – Occasional focused assessments of specific proposals or frameworks, timed to ongoing policy debates when possible.
Reading Notes – Shorter posts highlighting important papers, reports, or books that deserve wider attention, with key takeaways for those who won't read the originals.
I'm also planning some experimental formats: scenario planning exercises, dialogues between different expert perspectives, and what I'm calling "conceptual bridges"—posts explicitly designed to translate between different communities' ways of thinking about shared problems.
The Stakes
Why does any of this matter? Because we're living through a period of extraordinary technological transformation that coincides with rising geopolitical tension, ecological pressure, and institutional fragility. The decisions made in the next decade about AI governance, nuclear postures, climate adaptation, and information systems will reverberate for generations.
Yet most analysis of these issues happens in isolation. AI safety researchers rarely engage with nuclear strategists. Climate scientists don't always consider security implications. Policymakers struggle to keep pace with technical developments. We're trying to navigate interconnected challenges with fragmented understanding.
This blog is my small attempt to help connect those fragments. I don't pretend to have answers to these challenges—I'm skeptical of anyone who claims they do. But I believe that better questions, clearer analysis, and more integrated thinking can help us navigate what's coming.
Come Along for the Ride!
If you've been reading The Next Frontier already, thank you for coming along on this evolution. If you're discovering it for the first time, welcome to a conversation about humanity's biggest challenges and most important choices.
You can still find The Next Frontier at thenextfrontier.blog! All your favourite posts from the past are still accessible, just in a slightly different format, and all future posts will still appear in your inbox and on the website as usual.
Subscribe if you want to receive posts directly in your inbox. Comment if you have insights to add or questions to raise. Share with others who might find value in these explorations. Most importantly, bring your own expertise and curiosity to these discussions. The challenges ahead are too complex for any single perspective to grasp fully.
The next frontier isn't just about technology or policy or philosophy, it's about understanding how all of these intersect to shape our collective future. I'm looking forward to exploring it with you.
“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” - Carl Sagan
The Next Frontier is now available on Substack at thenextfrontier.blog. Subscribe for weekly analysis at the intersection of emerging technology and existential risk.