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Justin Sinclair

Justin Sinclair

Samuel Justin Sinclair, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and director of the Psychological Assessment and Research Service (PARSe) at Brigham and Women's Hospital / Harvard, who writes for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the Doomsday Clock and existential risk.

Jun 18, 2026

8:11
Can you just start off by telling me kinda what is the Doomsday Clock?
8:16
So the Doomsday Clock is interesting.
8:18
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was formed in 1945 by a collective of Manhattan Project scientists who, after sort of developing the nuclear bomb, felt a strong need to kind of warn the public and warn governments about sort of the implications of its use.
8:37
And so they developed this, this organization at the University of Chicago in 1945, and then shortly thereafter they began using the metaphor of the Doomsday Clock basically as a medium of, of beginning to talk about and warn people about the seriousness of, at the time, the sort of threat of nuclear weapons.
8:57
Basically, it's a mechanism that the bulletin uses to communicate kind of how dangerous current dynamics are in society.
9:07
So not only sort of the rise and proliferation of nuclear weapons, but also things like more recently climate change, disruptive technologies, artificial intelligence.
9:18
All of those things get factored into how the bulletin calibrates the clock each year.
12:07
It could be- An artificial superintelligence that comes online and fundamentally changes what it means to be a human on Earth.

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