Survey Assessing Risks from AI (SARA)

With Michael Noetel at The University of Queensland, I conducted a representative survey of ~1,000 Australian adults in Feb 2024 to understand public perceptions of AI risks and support for AI governance actions in Australia.

We found that:

• Australians are most concerned about AI risks where AI acts unsafely (e.g., acting in conflict with human values, failure of critical infrastructure), is misused (e.g., cyber attacks, biological weapons), or displaces the jobs of humans; they are least concerned about AI-assisted surveillance, or bias and discrimination in AI decision-making.
• Australians judge “preventing dangerous and catastrophic outcomes from AI” the #1 priority for the Australian Government in AI; 9 in 10 Australians support creating a new regulatory body for AI.
• The majority of Australians (8 in 10) support the statement that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.

More on this project:

• Website
• Key results briefing
• Technical report

Contact me if you’d like a personal briefing on the findings.

Safe and Responsible AI Submission

Policy submission and analysis work supporting Australia’s approach to AI governance and safety.

SCRUB COVID-19 Survey

The SCRUB COVID-19 survey aimed to provide current and future policy makers with actionable insights into public attitudes and behaviours relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

I led this project, which was incubated at Ready Research, funded initially by Monash University, and then funded and conducted collaboratively with the Victorian Government.

Over 2020-2021 we conducted 21 waves of the survey, about 1 every 3 weeks, and collected rich behavioural and attitudinal data from more than 40,000 people.

Read more about the project on the BehaviourWorks Australia website

Climate Adaptation Mission

The BehaviourWorks Australia Climate Adaptation Mission explored how systems thinking, knowledge co-production, and behavioural public policy experiments could help Australian communities reduce harms from climate change. I co-led this project with collaborators Stefan Kaufman and Kien Nguyen.

Read more about this project on the BehaviourWorks Australia website

Scale-up Toolkit

With Victoria’s Behavioural Insights Unit; practical tools for scaling effective interventions. Part of the broader work at BehaviourWorks Australia on translating research into practice.

Read more on the BWA toolkit page.

Ready Research

I co-founded Ready Research in 2019. In this collaboration with Peter Slattery, Michael Noetel, and Emily Grundy, we do work aligned with the principles of effective altruism. We do research, training, and communication services to help address the world’s most pressing problems.

Read more at readyresearch.org