Virtual Library

Our virtual library is an online repository of all of the reports, papers, and briefings that IST has produced, as well as works that have influenced our thinking.

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Podcasts

TechnologIST Talks: Looking Back and Looking Ahead: Deep Dive on the New Cybersecurity Executive Order

Carole House, Megan Stifel, and Steve Kelly

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Podcasts

TechnologIST Talks: The Offense-Defense Balance

Philip Reiner and Heather Adkins

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Reports

The Generative Identity Initiative: Exploring Generative AI’s Impact on Cognition, Society, and the Future

Gabrielle Tran, Eric Davis

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Podcasts

TechnologIST Talks: A Transatlantic Perspective on Quantum Tech

Megan Stifel and Markus Pflitsch

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Podcasts

TechnologIST Talks: The Future is Quantum

Megan Stifel and Stefan Leichenauer

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Reports

Navigating AI Compliance, Part 1: Tracing Failure Patterns in History

Mariami Tkeshelashvili, Tiffany Saade

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Podcasts

TechnologIST Talks: The Cleantech Boom

Steve Kelly and Dr. Alex Gagnon

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Contribute to our Library!

We also welcome additional suggestions from readers, and will consider adding further resources as so much of our work has come through crowd-sourced collaboration already. If, for any chance you are an author whose work is listed here and you do not wish it to be listed in our repository, please, let us know.

SUBMIT CONTENT

An Engineering Perspective on Avoiding Inadvertent Nuclear War

Nancy Leveson

SUMMARY

In th.is essay, Nancy Leveson argues that using conservative techniques and avoiding unnecessarily complex software in critical functions in NC3 systems circumvented nuclear catastrophe in the past. Today, she concludes, a new approach is needed that avoids gratuitous complexity; emphasizes less, not more technology; and improves NC3 systems by developing “more powerful, socio-technical and system engineering and risk management approaches that involve paradigm changes from the approaches that are no longer working. These are only now coming into existence and will need technical advances and refinement.”

This report is accompanied by a Fourth Leg Podcast: The Curse of Flexibility.

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