UPDATE: The open call for advisees and collaborators is now closed. Thank you to everyone who applied. However, anyone interested in seeking our advice and/or collaborating with us is still welcome to contact us as per the instructions below and we will include them in our next advisees and collaborators program.

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GCRI is currently welcoming inquiries from people who are interested in seeking our advice and/or collaborating with us as part of our sixth annual Advising and Collaboration Program. Inquiries may cover any aspect of global …

View the paper “Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk”

Is climate change a global catastrophic risk? Warming temperatures are already causing a variety harms around the world, some quite severe, and they project to worsen as temperatures increase. However, despite the massive body of research on climate change, the potential for extreme global harms remains highly uncertain and controversial. This paper addresses the question by examining the theoretical definition of global catastrophic risk and by comparing climate change to another severe global risk, nuclear winter. …

View the paper “Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models”

Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown some impressive capabilities, but this has raised concerns about their potential to cause harm. Once concern is that LLMs could take over the world and cause catastrophic harm, potentially even killing everyone on the planet. However, this concern has been questioned and hotly debated. Therefore, this paper presents a careful analysis of LLM takeover catastrophe risk.

Concern about LLM takeover is noteworthy across the entire history of …

View the paper “On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity”

Diversity is an important ethical concept. It’s also relevant to global catastrophic risk in at least two ways: the risk of catastrophic biodiversity loss and the need for diversity among people working on global catastrophic risk. It’s additionally relevant to scenarios involving extreme good, such as in well-designed advanced AI. However, the ethics of diversity has been remarkably understudied. To help address the full range of issues involving diversity, this paper presents a foundational study of the …