Model Convo: Abi Olvera
On Bioweapons, AI's Upside, and Choosing Your Own Adventure
Welcome back to the Model Convo series — micro interviews with researchers in AI governance and related fields. If you know someone I should interview — maybe that’s you? — please email me.
This week’s convo is with Abi Olvera, who writes at Positive Sum.
Abi is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks, an Editorial Fellow at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and an affiliate with the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy.
What was your path into AI and what are you working on now?
I was a US diplomat for ten years. My official title was “generalist foreign service officer.” My job was to become an expert in whatever subject my diplomatic assignment required. I focused on a lot of AI-adjacent work like cyber, biotech, quantum, China.
I’ve been tracking AI since 2013. Back then, I followed object recognition apps that converted handwritten notes to text and watched natural language processing and text-to-speech improve. As the field accelerated, I made it a professional focus tracking AI as a whole and watching how it reshaped other sectors.
Now I focus on bottlenecks, particularly the underlying constraints that explain why the world looks the way it does. For example, cyber attacks are less common than you’d expect given how easy it is to hack insecure systems. A big bottleneck is that money laundering is hard!
I’m using this approach to look at bioweapons now. Many assume AI dramatically lowers the barrier to working with viruses. But biology is really hard and more unpredictable than other physical sciences. The same frustrations that limit legitimate scientists working on a cancer cure also frustrate someone trying to engineer a virus.
What works of art have most shaped your views on AI?
I devoured choose-your-own-adventure books as a kid. I read every one at the library.
Maybe that’s why it bothers me when movie characters end up in worst-case scenarios because they didn’t communicate clearly to their loved ones or call 911 when a reasonable person would have. Relatedly, films tend to be pessimistic about technology, but even those bad futures require society to make a string of bad decisions. A bad future isn’t the default. It’s also not what’s historically happened.
I can see this when I read about how the art of cooking and homemaking has transformed over the centuries. I am really fascinated with an 1800s frugal housewife book that explains how poorer people got by. Parents had toddlers learn to knit to make rags into rugs. People saved their fire ash to trade for soap. A lot of our recipes, like French toast, were to make stale food edible. We live in a very different, much better world.
What’s your most contrarian take on AI?
We’re going to be OK. Though we should still work on minimizing downsides and making sure things go well.
On job loss fears, people consistently underestimate how complex other people’s jobs are. I hear people in San Francisco assume think tanks can just be replaced by AI. But think tanks don’t only do research. These organizations compete for finite attention, build credibility over time, and signal alignment with shifting power centers. Trust is a scarce input that AI doesn’t automate directly.
Even in a world where AI handles most knowledge work, someone still has to break the status quo. That’s still human entrepreneurs, writers, artists, activists.
My hottest take: AI has probably improved more lives than it’s harmed so far. Anxiety and depression are the most common mental health problems. Studies show AI companion apps produce 30–35% improvement in symptoms. While not as effective as therapy, it’s cheaper and available 24/7. One study found 3% of Replika users said the app stopped their suicidal ideation.
Headlines focus on AI-assisted suicides. Mental health research, read as a whole, can also suggest AI has prevented more than it’s caused.
What are you reading, watching, or listening to now?
Substack! I love that it’s often practitioners writing outside their institutions or passionate people going super niche on a question I’m also noodling on.
For books: Superabundance and The Great Stagnation. For TV: The Pitt, and a Colombian show called La Pola about revolutionary-era Colombia. Watching characters be certain about things we now find horrendous (racial castes and the divine right of kings) is a reminder that moral frameworks can be powerful even when they’re wrong.
Go-to emerging tech music track?
Music energizes me during breaks. I love musical theater, pop, and soul. One of my main hobbies is learning to sing these. These genres might not seem directly connected, but hey, recorded music was once an emerging technology too.