About

Hello, my name’s Tolga. I’m a professional forecaster for the Swift Centre, INFER, and a Superforecaster at Good Judgment Inc. In these roles I provide accurate and well calibrated probability estimates of events occurring within a range of subjects, including: geopolitics, politics, artificial intelligence, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Recently, I have contributed to forecasts on Russia-Ukraine and the Monkeypox outbreak for the Swift Centre, and on long-term climate risk as part of a GJI project with the Forethought Foundation.

I’ve always liked trying to predict the future, but I never knew you could compete against others for accuracy until I learned of crowd forecasting in an article I read a couple of years ago. After forecasting over 100 questions on GJOpen on many different topics, and scoring in the top 0.6% of forecasters in each of the largest challenges of 2020 and 2021, I was offered and accepted the role as a professional Superforecaster at Good Judgment Inc, and began in December 2021.

I was born and raised in England, and then did my Bachelor’s in Mathematics at the University of St Andrews. As well as my forecasting, I have recently completed a Master’s in Mathematics at the University of Bergen. Apart from general forecasting, the main areas I am interested in are AI safety and governance, and existential and catastrophic risk reduction more broadly.

Projects

In 2023 I led 3 big projects relating to AI risk.

A 30% Chance of AI Catastrophe: Samotsvety’s Forecasts on AI Risks and the Impact of a Strong AI Treaty

This was a forecasting project I led with Samotsvety Forecasting where we sought to investigate the impact on AI catastrophic risk of different policy scenarios.

Treaty on Artificial Intelligence Safety And Cooperation (TAISC)

Here I authored a first attempt at a concrete treaty blueprint focused on mitigating catastrophic AI risk, known as the Treaty on Artificial Intelligenc.e Safety And Cooperation (TAISC). You can view the treaty blueprint here, or an overview here

Urging an International AI Treaty: An Open Letter

This was an open letter project I led, calling for an international AI treaty to be developed, proposing policies such as global compute limits, a CERN for AI Safety, and an international compliance commission. We obtained signatures from leaders in the field such as Yoshua Bengio, Bart Selman, Max Tegmark, Gary Marcus, Yi Zeng, Victoria Krakovna, and other prominent figures such as Claire ‘Grimes’ Boucher, and Daniel Dennett.

This was featured in the Mail Online here: ‘Godfather’ of AI is among hundreds of experts calling for urgent action to prevent the ‘potentially catastrophic’ risks posed by technology
I also wrote an article in The Yuan reflecting on these projects and the November AI Safety Summit: A Forecaster’s Foray into AI Safety

Forecasts

A selection of forecasts which I have contributed to:
– 19/10/2023 - Samotsvety - A 30% Chance of AI Catastrophe: Samotsvety’s Forecasts on AI Risks and the Impact of a Strong AI Treaty
– 16/10/2023 - Swift Centre - How the Gaza war may escalate internationally
– 13/10/2023 - Swift Centre - Israel’s war on Hamas is set to eclipse all previous Arab-Israeli conflicts
– 04/10/2023 - Swift Centre - Is Serbia about to invade Kosovo?
– 02/10/2023 - Swift Centre - El Niño: how severe will the floods, fires, and famines be?
– 08/09/2023 - Swift Centre - Will Israel’s judicial reforms be rejected?
– 31/07/2023 - Swift Centre - The outlook after the mutiny
– 24/06/2023 - Swift Centre - Live forecasting: Wagner mutiny
– 04/04/2023 - Swift Centre - UK life expectancy forecasting
– 17/02/2023 - Swift Centre - Will bird flu be the next pandemic?
– 24/01/2023 - Samotsvety - Update to Samotsvety AGI timelines
– 03/11/2022 - Swift Centre - What happens if Russia uses a nuclear weapon?
– 13/10/2022 - Swift Centre - Under what circumstances would Russia use a nuclear weapon?
– 03/10/2022 - Samotsvety - Samotsvety Nuclear Risk update October 2022
– 14/09/2022 - Swift Centre - Can Biden win in 2024?
– 09/09/2022 - Samotsvety - Samotsvety’s AI risk forecasts
– 15/08/2022 - Good Judgment Inc - Superforecasting Long-Term Risks and Climate Change
– 09/08/2022 - Swift Centre - Monkeypox Outlook- Update
– 27/07/2022 - Swift Centre - What happens to Germany if Russia cuts off the gas this winter?
– 11/07/2022 - Swift Centre - Ukraine/Russia outlook
– 27/06/2022 - Swift Centre - Monkeypox: The outlook for 2022

Education

University of Bergen

Master’s degree, Applied and Computational Mathematics

University of St Andrews

Bachelor of Science (Bsc), Mathematics