Dear friends,

The saying “anything is possible” isn’t quite true, but much more is possible than we sometimes might think. For example, it is now clear that United States Treasury bonds are not the risk-free investments they were long assumed to be. The risk-free assumption was rooted in a failure of imagination, a failure to recognize the possibilities of divided government. So too for many global catastrophic risks. Recent research on the economics of climate change has emphasized the importance of catastrophic outcomes outside the range of what most climate scientists expect. Many people assume that the risk of US-Russia nuclear war is near-zero now that the Cold War is over, but the two countries nearly found themselves on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war. Then on September 3 Russia picked up an Israeli missile test on its radars that might have passed for an attack on Syria. That incident passed without harm, but it’s a worthy reminder of how geopolitical events can take unexpected turns. But the biggest failure of imagination may come when we dismiss whole classes of risk, such as risk from speculative emerging technologies. The new book Our Final Invention by James Barrat documents the widespread failure of imagination regarding the risk of artificial intelligence. More on these topics in the newsletter below.

I encourage us all to think both in terms of what is likely and in terms of what we cannot rule out. Unless we can strictly rule out the possibility of certain global catastrophes, then they remain as global catastrophic risks. The limits of our imaginations should make us more cautious, not less. As we learn more, we can adjust accordingly, either with the confidence of knowing we’re safe or, if need be, by confronting threats that once seemed unlikely.

As always, thank you for your interest in our work. We welcome any comments, questions, and criticisms you may have.

Sincerely,
Seth Baum, Executive Director

September GCR News Summary

Robert de Neufville presents our seventh monthly news summary. This month covers the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, new EPA rules for greenhouse gas emissions, a new X Prize for ocean acidity monitoring, antibiotic resistant organisms, a new book on nuclear weapons accidents, discussion of ongoing geopolitical hotspots, and more.

For the full summary, please see GCR News Summary September 2013.

As always, if you know of something that may be worth including in the next news summary, please post it in the comment thread of the current summary, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant@gcrinstitute.org).

New GCRI Associate

GCRI welcomes Caroline Zaw-Mon as our newest Research Associate. Caroline is a Risk Project Manager at the University of Denver and has a background in history and international security. Caroline contributes to GCRI research on nuclear war, taking a historical perspective to assess the efficacy of nuclear deterrence.

New Popular Articles & Medium Collection

Seth Baum has a new popular article at the Huffington Post: Taming the Gigaton Gorilla: Using Syria Diplomacy to Help Avoid U.S.-Russia Nuclear War. The article came out at the height of the Syria standoff and discusses how to approach the situation in terms of global catastrophic risk.

Robert de Neufville is curating a new collection of articles at the popular new publishing platform Medium, under the heading Catastrophic Risk. There is one article online so far: Can the Human Race Survive? by Robert de Neufville. Check back for more articles in the near future. Please contact Robert if you would like to publish something there, including reprints of articles published elsewhere. His email isrobert.deneufville@gmail.com.

Baum To Present At Climate-Friendly Climate Research Conference

Seth Baum will present about GCRI at the upcoming Climate-Friendly Climate Research Conference, hosted by Klimaforschungsnetzwerk Österreich/Climate Change Centre Austria. Baum’s talk is titled “Building an International Think Tank with Remote Collaboration”. Details of the talk are here. The theme of the conference is helping advance research with less climate impact, such as by using remote collaboration to reduce plane travel. Baum will share GCRI’s experience with remote collaboration.

Past Online Lectures

On 25 September, Tony Milligan, Lecturer with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, presented on virtue ethics. The talk was titled ‘Virtue, Risk and Space Colonization’. A full summary is available here.

On 18 September, GCRI Deputy Director Grant Wilson presented on international law for geoengineering. The talk was titled ‘Murky Waters: Ambiguous International Law for Ocean Fertilization and Other Geoengineering’. A full summary is available here.

The mp3 audio file for Nick Beckstead’s reprise lecture is now online. The reprise lecture was held 28 Aug 2013, titled On The Overwhelming Importance Of Shaping The Far Future. An online summary for the original lecture is online here.

Upcoming Online Lectures

There are no online lectures scheduled for October. We are taking a pause to reflect on the lectures and assess how to make them better. We will be back in November with practice lectures for the Society for Risk Analysis meeting. Meanwhile, please see our blog post Online Lecture Reflections And Plans. Please send any feedback you may have on the lectures to Seth Baum (seth@gcrinstitute.org).

We conclude the newsletter with two items from outside GCRI:

Call for Applications: CSIS Nuclear Scholars Initiative

The Center for Strategic and International Studies Nuclear Scholars Initiative has announced its 2014 competition: “The Nuclear Scholars Initiative aims to provide top graduate students and young professionals from around the country with a unique venue to interact and dialogue with senior experts on nuclear weapons issues.” The program runs January 2014 – June 2014 in Washington, DC. The submission deadline is November 8, 2013.

New AI Risk Book: Our Final Invention by James Barrat

Documentarian James Barrat has a new book Our Final Invention on AI as a global catastrophic risk. Luke Muehlhauser of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute has a review at KurzweilAI.net. GCRI’s Seth Baum is scheduled to have a review out on Friday at Scientific American Blogs. Here is a sneak-peek excerpt from Baum’s review:

Humanity today faces incredible threats and opportunities: climate change, nuclear weapons, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and much, much more. But some people argue that these things are all trumped by one: artificial intelligence (AI). To date, this argument has been confined mainly to science fiction and a small circle of scholars and enthusiasts. Enter documentarian James Barrat, whose new book Our Final Invention states the case for (and against) AI in clear, plain language.