Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Project Manager, bioscientist and risk analyst from the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, offered a sobering conclusion to the first round, in a talk that cautioned of the risks of disruptive technological wildcards. In this context, he discussed existing or emergent technologies—nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology 'do-it-yourself' synthetic biology—that might have benign applications, but the development or use of which may be hard to anticipate or control, and could pose a grave, even existential threat.

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