GCR News Summary February 2015

Post Date March 05, 2015
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US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva image courtesy of the US Department of State

The Global Challenges Foundation published a report on the risks human civilization faces (GCRI’s Seth Baum and Robert de Neufville contributed content to the report). The report identified 12 different areas of risk “that for all practical purposes can be called infinite”. These are nuclear war, global pandemics, climate change, ecological catastrophe, asteroid impacts, super-volcano eruptions, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, bad global governance, the …

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Global Catastrophes: The Most Extreme Risks

Post Date February 05, 2015
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View the paper “Global Catastrophes: The Most Extreme Risks”

The most extreme risk are those that threaten the entirety of human civilization, known as global catastrophic risks. The very extreme nature of global catastrophes makes them both challenging to analyze and important to address. They are challenging to analyze because they are largely unprecedented and because they involve the entire global human system. They are important to address because they threaten everyone around the world and future generations. Global catastrophic risks also pose some deep dilemmas. …

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January Newsletter: Vienna Conference on Nuclear Weapons

Post Date January 11, 2015
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Category media coverage, newsletter

Dear friends,

In December, I had the honor of speaking at the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, hosted by the Austrian Foreign Ministry in the lavish Hofburg Palace. The audience was 1,000 people representing 158 national governments plus leading nuclear weapons NGOs, experts, and members of the media.

My talk “What is the risk of nuclear war?” presented core themes from the risk analysis of nuclear war. I explained that each of us is, on average, more likely to die from nuclear war …

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GCR News Summary January 2014

Post Date January 30, 2014
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President Obama delivering the 2014 State of the Union address image courtesy of The White House/Pete Souza

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decided to leave the small hand of its symbolic “Doomsday Clock” at five minutes to midnight. The amount of time left until midnight represents how close we are to global disaster. The clock’s hands were set at two minutes to midnight at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s. In an open letter to the members of …

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KVA Emerging Technologies Event

Post Date January 21, 2014
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Category emerging technologies, events

On 17 March 2014, Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien (KVA, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) is hosting an event Emerging technologies and the future of humanity. I will give a talk “The great downside dilemma for risky emerging technologies”, loosely based on themes from my recent paper Double catastrophe: Intermittent stratospheric geoengineering induced by societal collapse. Usually I try to avoid travel like this, but this is a good event and they wouldn’t let me present remotely. Here’s my abstract:

The great downside dilemma for risky emerging technologies
Many …

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Grant Wilson Gives Lecture on International Law for Geoengineering

Post Date September 25, 2013
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Category emerging technologies, environmental change, law & policy, online lectures

On Wednesday 18 September, GCRI hosted an online lecture by Grant Wilson entitled ‘Murky Waters: Ambiguous International Law for Ocean Fertilization and Other Geoengineering’. Wilson is GCRI’s Deputy Director and a recent graduate of Lewis & Clark Law School, where he specialized in international law regarding emerging technologies and the environment. The lecture is based on a draft paper of the same title.

Emphasis on geoengineering comes from increasingly dire projections of climate change, amounting to a significant global catastrophic risk. The international community’s failure to …

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September 2013 Newsletter

Post Date September 05, 2013
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Dear friends,

Seth Baum is out of the office now, so I am sending the newsletter in his absence. This month, I would like to talk a bit about geoengineering. Geoengineering is the large-scale manipulation of the climate, particularly to alleviate the effects of climate change (also called “climate engineering”). Geoengineering epitomizes how many distinct global catastrophic risks have a dynamic relationship. For example, in one possible scenario, society decides to lower the planet’s temperature by engaging in stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI)—a technology that essentially blankets …

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Grant Wilson To Deliver Online Lecture On Geoengineering International Law 18 September

Post Date August 21, 2013
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This is the pre-event announcement for an online lecture by Grant Wilson, GCRI’s Deputy Director. The lecture is based on a draft paper of the same title.

Here is the full talk info:

Murky Waters: Ambiguous International Law for Ocean Fertilization and Other Geoengineering
Wednesday, 18 September 2013, 17:00 GMT (10:00 Los Angeles, 13:00 New York, 18:00 London)
To be held online via Skype. RSVP required by email to Seth Baum (seth [at] gcrinstitute.org). Space is limited.

Abstract:

In July 2012, the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation (HSRC) dumped about 100 tons …

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GCR News Summary July 2013

Post Date July 28, 2013
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Artificially-colored MERS virus image courtesy of CSIRO.

ConceptNet, an artificial intelligence program developed by a team led by Catherine Havasi at the MIT Media Lab, performed as well as an average four-year-old on the information, vocabulary, and word reasoning portions of standard intelligence test. The program uses a crowdsourced semantic network—a database of statements of basic facts—to answer questions. Miles Brundage explained in Slate that the program did well on “precisely the parts of the test that one would expect computers to excel …

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Aladdin Diakun Gives Public Lecture On Geoengineering And IP Law

Post Date June 05, 2013
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Category emerging technologies, online lectures, uncertainty

On Thursday 16 May, GCRI hosted an online lecture by Aladdin Diakun entitled ‘Towards the Effective Governance of Geoengineering: What Role for Intellectual Property?’ Aladdin is an MA Candidate at the Balsillie School of International Affairs who is researching how IP law can serve as a form of de facto governance of geoengineering.

The UK Royal Society defines geoengineering as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.” With the atmospheric concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere recently having reached 400ppm—higher than …

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