Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Connectivity, Global Fragility and the Added Danger of AI

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, in conversation with Visiting Professor of Government Bernard Avishai on Connectivity, Global Fragility and the Added Danger of AI.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker (quantitative trader) before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability.

He is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game) covering broad facets of uncertainty. It has been published into 41 languages. In addition to his trader life, Taleb has also written, as a backup of the Incerto, more than 70 scholarly papers in mathematical statistics, quantitative finance, statistical physics, philosophy, ethics, economics, & international affairs, around the notion of risk and probability (grouped in the Technical Incerto ). Nassim Nicholas Taleb is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering (only a quarter time position) [and, finance related bio only: scientific advisor for Universa Investments]. His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle disorder (“antifragile”).

Taleb refuses all honors and anything that “turns knowledge into a spectator sport”. Nassim Nicholas Taleb traveled the conventional route of education to real-life and theory to practice in inverse sequence from the common one, moving from the practical to the philosophical to the mathematical. He started as a trader, then got a doctorate in mid-trading career; he wrote literary books before writing technical papers, and his work became progressively more technical and formal with time.

Bernard Avishai is a visiting Professor of Government at Dartmouth, Adjunct Professor of Business at the Hebrew University, and formerly taught at MIT and Duke. A Guggenheim fellow, he is the author of The Tragedy of Zionism, A New Israel, The Hebrew Republic, and Promiscuous: Portnoy's Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness. He contributes regularly on political economy and Israeli affairs to the New Yorker; and has written dozens of articles for Harper's, The New York Review, The Nation and New York Times Magazine. He is a former editor of Harvard Business Review, and International Director of Intellectual Capital at KPMG.

Sponsored by the Political Economy Project and The Initiative for Global Security at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth.

Dartmouth College, October 3, 2023