Mapping Civilization's Resilience Gaps w/ Dr. Evan Miyazono
Aug 16, 2026·
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3 min read
Into AI Safety
Dr. Evan Miyazono joins Jacob to talk about his path from quantum networking and Protocol Labs to founding Atlas Computing. They discuss why Atlas moved away from formal methods research and toward what Evan calls “field strategy”: identifying important problems, figuring out what interventions could actually address them, and finding the people best positioned to make them happen. The conversation also covers the resilience gap map, coordination failures, AI safety, "value alignment," and the question of how to decide what work is worth doing when there’s no obvious organization responsible for it.
Check out the video version of this podcast on the Kairos.fm YouTube channel, or the extended version on Patreon!
INTERVIEW RECORDED 2026.05.27; ASIDES RECORDED 2026.07.14; TRANSCRIPT
Chapters
00:00:00 ❙ Intro
00:05:03 ❙ From Quantum Internet to Blockchain
00:13:29 ❙ Founding Atlas Computing
00:18:25 ❙ Formal Methods Explained (ASIDE)
00:24:39 ❙ Narrower AI & Domain-Specific Safety
00:35:54 ❙ The Pivot to Field Strategy
00:52:27 ❙ Value Alignment vs. Skill
01:09:16 ❙ The Resilience Gap Map
01:26:32 ❙ Guarding Against Funder Capture
01:49:09 ❙ Rapid Fire Questions
01:58:01 ❙ Outro
00:05:03 ❙ From Quantum Internet to Blockchain
00:13:29 ❙ Founding Atlas Computing
00:18:25 ❙ Formal Methods Explained (ASIDE)
00:24:39 ❙ Narrower AI & Domain-Specific Safety
00:35:54 ❙ The Pivot to Field Strategy
00:52:27 ❙ Value Alignment vs. Skill
01:09:16 ❙ The Resilience Gap Map
01:26:32 ❙ Guarding Against Funder Capture
01:49:09 ❙ Rapid Fire Questions
01:58:01 ❙ Outro
Links
- Evan’s personal website
- Atlas Computing website
- The AI Resilience Gap Map
- Atlas Computing blogpost - Civilization’s Maintenance Backlog
- Atlas Computing blogpost - Your Solution Doesn’t Know Your Problem Exists
Formal Methods
- Galois blogpost - What Are Formal Methods?
- Quanta Magazine article - Hacker-Proof Code Confirmed
- Vitalik Buterin blogpost - A shallow dive into formal verification
- Quanta Magazine article - Cryptography This Is Provably Secure
- Preprint - Inductive Deductive Synthesis: Enabling AI to Generate Formally Verified Systems
- Atlas Computing blogpost - CSLib: Lean’s Formal Software Foundation
- Lean website
- CSLib website
Meta-science
- Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen essay discussion - We Need a New Science of Progress
- Federation of American Scientists article - Focused Research Organizations
- Sociocracy For All article - Consent-based decision-making
Referenced Media
- 3Blue1Brown video and blogpost - But How Does Bitcoin Actually Work?
- Rich Sutton essay - The Bitter Lesson
- Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff book - Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed
- Ethan Mollick substack article Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier
Organizations/Programs Mentioned
- Protocol Labs website
- ARIA (UK) website
- ARIA programme page - Safeguarded AI
- DARPA website
- Renaissance Philanthropy website
- Theorem website - AI-first formal verification lab
- Convergent Research website
- Frontier Model Forum website
- Coefficient Giving website (prev. Open Philanthropy)
- Survival and Flourishing Fund website
- NSF program page - NSF X-Labs
People Mentioned
- David “davidad” Dalrymple essay - Open Agency Architecture
- Andrew Critch’s personal website
- Jason Gross’ GitHub
- Alexandre Rademaker personal website
Other Niche Topics Mentioned
- Wikipedia article - Arrow’s impossibility theorem
- Wikipedia article - Approval voting
- Wikipedia article - Sortition
- Wikipedia article - Hume’s guillotine / the is-ought problem
- Wikipedia article - 501(c)(6) nonprofit designation
- Wikipedia article - Know Your Customer (KYC)
- Wikipedia article - Mobile driver’s license (mDL)
- Wikipedia article - Community Notes
