GCR News Summary August 2015

Korean Demilitarized Zone fence image courtesy of Sangmun Shin/Republic of Korea Ministry of National Defense under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (image has been cropped)

North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire after two South Korean soldiers were injured by land mines. South Korea claimed North Korea was responsible for placing the mines near a South Korean guard post in the Demilitarized Zone separating the two countries. South Korea responded by using loudspeakers to broadcast propaganda across the border. The Centre for North Korea-US Peace’s Kim Myong-chol, who some …

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GCR News Summary April 2015

US Secretary of State John Kerry addressing the Non-Proliferation Review Conference image courtesy of the US State Department

Angela Kane, the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, warned that the nuclear powers’ lack of meaningful progress toward disarmament could undermine the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). US Secretary of State John Kerry said at the NPT Review Conference that as of September, 2014 the US had 4,717 nuclear warheads—87 fewer than the year before. Kerry said that the US planned to accelerate dismantling its approximately 2,500 retired warheads by …

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GCR News Summary May 2014

Pope Francis image courtesy of Jeffrey Bruno/Aleteia under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Billionaire Petro Poroshenko won the Ukrainian presidential election with 55% of the vote. Voter turnout was high, although pro-Russian separatists prevented many people from voting in the eastern part of the country. Poroshenko promised to bring peace to the eastern regions and move the country closer to the European Union. Russia said that it was moving its forces away from the …

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GCR News Summary February 2014

Smiling camel image courtesy of Hendrik Dacquin under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil said at a CIO Network conference that we will develop “human-level” artificial intelligence by the year 2029. Kurzweil—who argued in his book The Singularity Is Near that advances in artificial intelligence will lead to runaway technological progress in the near future—predicted that artificial intelligence systems would also be used to enhance human intelligence. Kurzweil also suggested we …

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GCR News Summary August 2013

California Rim Fire image courtesy of the USDA.

California governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for San Francisco County when a large wildfire on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains threatened to disrupt public utilities. Two of the three hydroelectric power stations in the region were forced to shut down. San Francisco also gets 85% of its water from the nearby Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Most of the western US is in drought and the recent increase in the number …

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GCR News Summary March 2013

This post marks the first of what we hope will be an ongoing series of global catastrophic risk news summaries. You can help by posting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send them via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).

In Science, British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees argued that we need to take existential risk more seriously. Foreign Policy did a profile of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which Rees helped …

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Hurricane Sandy & GCR In Scientific American

Here’s a quick FYI: I just published an article Hurricane Sandy Hints At The Perils Of Global Catastrophe in Scientific American. This discusses the impacts of Sandy on the US and Haiti, and what this means for global catastrophic risk. The basic idea is that when one event disrupts multiple parts of the world, they can’t help each other out like they usually do. Right now the US can’t help Haiti as much because it’s busy helping itself. In a global catastrophe, there may not …

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