Carl O. Pabo

I spent several decades studying the structure and design of DNA-binding proteins, work that helped show how proteins recognize specific DNA sequences. In 2001, I resigned my positions as a tenured Professor at MIT and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to pursue what I had come to see as a larger challenge: understanding the power and limits of human thought, and their implications for humanity’s future.

After years of research on thought, and on the pressing challenges of the Anthropocene, I now focus on addressing the dangers that arise from a mismatch between the capacity of the human mind and the complexity of the world we have built—a gap that widens, and becomes more dangerous, with each advance in artificial intelligence.

To narrow that gap, I have developed new “tools for thought” to help society plan amid this complexity, and I am now using AI to build and test them. I look forward to collaborating with others who see how complexity confounds the human mind, who recognize that standard approaches to planning are failing to meet the challenges of the modern age, and who are ready to develop the new strategies needed to build a thriving human future.