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Photo from 2004. |
Olle Häggström
Professor
Dept of Mathematical Sciences
Chalmers University of
Technology
S-412 96 GÖTEBORG
SWEDEN
Phone: +46 31 772 5311 (office)
Email: olleh@chalmers.se
August 2025: Finally, after 9 long years of not touching it, I am now giving this webpage a much-needed update! Who knows when I will get around to it again, and for that reason I have opted for a major cutdown and cleanup.
I completed my PhD in mathematical statistics in 1994 and became a professor of the same subject in 2000, first at the University of Gothenburg and later transitioned to Chalmers. My academic and research career up to now can roughly be divided in two phases, where...
- during the first phase I worked on probability theory and statistical mechanics in a highly mathematical tradition, while...
- in the second phase I've been working much more eclectically on issues around emerging technologies and existential risk.
It's hard to pinpoint an exact year when the transition to the second phase took place, but it mostly happened in the early 2010s. Starting around 2020 or so, my focus has mostly zoomed in on the technology that has increasingly begun to look like the uniquely important determinant of our future, namely AI.
While I hardly do pure mathematics at all anymore, there is much from the first phase that I think back fondly upon. Regarding my publications (see Google Scholar for a more extensive list) from those good old days, here is a small sample of those I'm especially happy with and that can serve as a starting point for a beginner wishing to understand the kind of math I was up to:
-
Häggström, O. (1997) Infinite clusters in dependent automorphism
invariant percolation on trees,
Annals of Probability 25, 1423-1436.
-
Häggström, O., Peres, Y. and Steif, J. (1997) Dynamical percolation,
Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré, Probabilités et Statistiques
33, 497-528.
- Georgii, H.-O., Häggström, O. and Maes, C. (2001)
The random geometry of equilibrium phases,
Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena, Volume 18 (C. Domb
and J.L. Lebowitz, eds), pp 1-142, Academic Press, London.
- Häggström, O. and Jonasson, J. (2006)
Uniqueness
and non-uniqueness in percolation theory, Probability Surveys 3,
289-344.
- Häggström, O. (2007) Problem solving is often a matter of cooking up an appropriate Markov chain, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics 34, 768-780.
- Deijfen, M., Häggström, O. and Holroyd, A. (2012)
Percolation in
invariant Poisson graphs with i.i.d. degrees, Arkiv för Matematik 50,
41-58.
My papers produced during the second phase tend to have a very different character. Here are a few of them:
- Verendel, V. and Häggström, O. (2017) Fermi's paradox, extraterrestrial life
and the future of humanity: a Bayesian analysis, International Journal
of Astrobiology 16, 14-18.
- Baum, S., Armstrong, S., Ekenstedt, T., Häggström, O., Hanson, R.,
Kuhlemann, K., Maas, M., Miller, J., Salmela, M., Sandberg, A., Sotala, K.,
Torres, P., Turchin, A. and Yampolskiy, R. (2019)
Long-term trajectories of human
civilization, Foresight 21, 53-83.
- Häggström, O. (2019) Challenges to the Omohundro-Bostrom framework for
AI motivations, Foresight 21, 153-166.
- Miller, J., Yampolskiy, R. and Häggström, O. (2020) An AGI modifying its utility function in violation of the strong orthogonality thesis, Philosophies 5, 40.
- Häggström, O. (2021) Aspects of mind uploading, in Transhumanism: The Proper Guide to a Posthuman Condition or a Dangerous Idea? (eds W. Hofkirchner and H.-J. Kreowski), Springer, New York, p 3-20.
- Miller, J., Yampolskiy, R., Häggström, O. and Armstrong, S. (2021) Chess as a testing ground for the oracle approach to AI safety, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Safety 2021
co-located with the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
- Häggström, O. (2021) AI, orthogonality, and the Müller-Cannon instrumental vs general intelligence distinction.
- Häggström, O. (2022) Artificial general intelligence and the common sense argument, in
Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence 2021 (ed. V. Müller), Springer, New York, p 155-
160.
- Häggström, O. (2022) The hinge of history and the choice between patient and urgent longtermism, to appear in Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future (eds H. Greaves, J. Barrett and D. Thorstad), Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Häggström, O. (2023) Are large language models intelligent? Are humans?, Computer Sciences and Mathematics Forum 8(1), 68.
- Häggström, O. (2024) On the troubled relation between AI ethics and AI safety, to appear in Contemporary Debates in the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (eds S. Nyholm, A. Kasirzadeh and J. Serilli), Wiley, New York.
- Häggström, O. (2025) Our AI future and the need to stop the bear.
- Häggström, O. (2025) Advanced AI and the ethics of risking everything.
Those are some of my papers. In addition, I've authored five books, the set of which spans both phases of my career:
- O. Häggström (2002) Finite Markov Chains and Algorithmic Applications, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
- O. Häggström (2004) Slumpens skördar: Strövtåg i sannolikhetsteorin, Studentlitteratur, Lund.
- O. Häggström (2008) Riktig vetenskap och dåliga imitationer, Fri Tanke, Stockholm.
- O. Häggström (2016) Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- O. Häggström (2021) Tänkande maskiner: Den artificiella intelligensens genombrott, Fri Tanke, Stockholm. (If you decide to read this one, make sure it's the second edition, from 2023!)
If you want to catch up with what occupies me most at present, the best way may be to check my blog Häggström hävdar. Or send me an email!