August 2023 Newsletter: Call For Advisees & Collaborators

Dear friends,

GCRI’s 2023 Advising and Collaboration Program is now open. We welcome anyone who is interested in getting more involved in global catastrophic risk, or advancing your career in it. We also welcome those who would simply like to connect or reconnect. This year, we are emphasizing five themes: diversity and inclusion; AI governance; AI politics; public scholarship; and students and early-career professionals. Your interests do not need to fit within one or more these themes to participate, but it helps if they do. Please …

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Even With Electric Vehicles, An Expanded Turnpike Extension Would Be Bad For The Environment

View the article “Even With Electric Vehicles, An Expanded Turnpike Extension Would Be Bad For The Environment”.

There is currently a heated policy debate over a part of the New Jersey Turnpike across from Lower Manhattan (circled in the image above). The Turnpike Authority has proposed replacing and expanding this stretch of road. The governor supports it, but most local politicians oppose it. This article argues against the Turnpike expansion, detailing its environmental harms and instead calling for investment in transit, cycling, and walking. It …

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New York’s Housing Plans Must Address Affordability—& Climate Change

View the article “New York’s Housing Plans Must Address Affordability—& Climate Change”.

New York City is one of the most energy-efficient places in the United States, thanks to its high population density and excellent (by US standards) transit. However, it is also one of the most expensive places, thanks to its extremely high cost of housing. This article calls for an ambitious increase in the local housing supply to address both affordability and climate change. It is published in City Limits, a news publication …

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Assessing Natural Global Catastrophic Risks

View the paper “Assessing Natural Global Catastrophic Risks”

Humanity today faces a wide range of threats. Some, such as nuclear war, are of human origin. Others, such as volcano eruptions, are not. The relative importance of these two categories of risk is a matter of ongoing debate. This paper argues that prior theoretical research has understated the risk from natural threats. It presents analysis of six natural global catastrophic risks, finding potential for several to pose a high ongoing risk to humanity.

Prior research has posed a …

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Doing Better on Climate Change

View the article “Doing Better on Climate Change”.

This article, published in the Effective Altruism Forum, presents a wide-ranging discussion of how to factor climate change into efforts to make the world a better place. The article relates climate change to other global catastrophic risks and related issues. It emphasizes the value of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and explains which activities are effective at reducing emissions.

The article begins as follows:

Summary: How to factor climate change into our efforts to make the world a better place. For …

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Nonhuman Value: A Survey of the Intrinsic Valuation of Natural and Artificial Nonhuman Entities

View the paper “Nonhuman Value: A Survey of the Intrinsic Valuation of Natural and Artificial Nonhuman Entities”

The concept of global catastrophic
risk is customarily defined in human terms. Details vary, but a global
catastrophe is almost always regarded as something bad that happens to
humans. However, in moral philosophy, it is often considered that things
that happen to nonhumans can also be bad—and likewise for good things. In some
circumstances, whether and how nonhumans are valued may be the difference
between extremely good or catastrophically bad outcomes for nonhumans. This
raises the …

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Space Expansion Must Support Sustainability – On Earth and in Space

View the article “Space Expansion Must Support Sustainability – On Earth and in Space”.

This article, published with the Royal United Services
Institute, discusses the role of sustainability when expanding human activities
into outer space. The article illustrates how a framework for space expansion
is being set right now, but that this framework risks expanding unsustainable practices
and paradigms into space. Consequently, global civilization risks wasting
immense amounts of resources and even failing to sustain humanity at worst. In response,
the article suggests five points of emphasis for a robust sustainability …

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Lessons for Artificial Intelligence from Other Global Risks

View the paper “Lessons for Artificial Intelligence from Other Global Risks”

It has become clear in recent years that AI poses important global risks. The study of AI risk is relatively new, but it can potentially learn a lot from the study of similar, better-studied risks. GCRI’s new paper applies to the study of AI risk lessons from four other risks: biotechnology, nuclear weapons, global warming, and asteroids. The paper is co-authored by GCRI’s Seth Baum, Robert de Neufville, and Tony Barrett, along with GCRI Senior …

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Wired UK: Apocalypse, Now?

In its March cover feature on the end of the world, Wired UK wrote about the work the GCRI does—along with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), and the Future of Life Institute (FLI)—to mitigate catastrophic risk. In an article on the 10 biggest threats facing civilization, Wired UK discusses the research GCRI does on the risk that an inadvertent nuclear war could cause a nuclear winter and on systemic risk from climate …

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Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: Trump and Global Catastrophic Risk

GCRI Executive Director Seth Baum has a new article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on what Donald Trump’s election means for global catastrophic risk, which has been covered in Quartz and Elite Daily. Baum writes that the fact that Trump will have the authority to launch nuclear weapons should particularly concern us, given his tendency to behave erratically, Trump’s election also has implications for the prospect of conflict with Russia and China, the stability of the global world order, the survival of democracy in the US, and our …

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