Dave Denkenberger To Deliver Online Lecture On Post-Catastrophe Food Crisis 22 August

Post Date July 23, 2013
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Category online lectures, post-catastrophe

This is the pre-event announcement for an online lecture by Dave Denkenberger, Ph.D., an engineer at Ecova.

Here is the full talk info:

Feeding Everyone: Solving the Food Crisis in Event of Global Catastrophes that Kill the Sun or Crops
Thursday 22 August, 16:00 GMT (10:00 Denver, 12:00 New York, 17:00 London)
To be held online via Skype. RSVP required by email to Seth Baum (seth [at] gcrinstitute.org). Space is limited.

Please note: There will be no online post-lecture summary for this.

It is widely assumed that if agricultural production is …

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Interview At Arup Connect

Post Date July 19, 2013
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Category media coverage

Quick FYI: I’m featured in a new interview at Arup Connect, which is the online magazine of Arup, a multinational engineering company working on the built environment. Basically, they help build stuff. The interview was conducted by Sarah Wesseler, who I met at a Science Writers in New York. Ah networking. Anyway the interview covers why we started GCRI, some of the challenges and opportunities, and more.

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Maher Lecture Rescheduled For 1 August

Post Date July 18, 2013
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Category online lectures

Tim Maher’s online lecture has been rescheduled. The new time is Thursday 1 August 2013, at 17:00 GMT (13:00 New York, 18:00 London, 19:00 Amsterdam). The original lecture was cancelled due to a scheduling problem. Please RSVP to me if you would like to attend the new lecture. We apologize to everyone who has been inconvenienced by the rescheduling and we appreciate your patience.

Here is the updated talk info:

Ambient Intelligence: Implications for Global Environmental Change and Totalitarianism Risk
Thursday 1 August 2013, 17:00 GMT (13:00 New …

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Organization Directory Updates

Post Date July 17, 2013
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Category resources

Grant Wilson and I have gone through and updated the GCR organization directory. The directory now contains 130 organizations. The new entries are below. Please let us know if we may be missing any organizations.

Reflecting back on the seven months since the directory was originally published, it has proved quite useful. it has been used for job searches, general networking, and just to get a sense for the scope of the GCR community. This has been Exhibit A in our effort to dispel the somewhat …

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SRA 2013 GCR Sessions Announced

Post Date July 09, 2013
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Category announcement

The Society of Risk Analysis has just confirmed that our two global catastrophic risk sessions have been accepted for the 2013 SRA Annual Meeting. For full speaker & abstract info, please click here. For info on past SRA GCR sessions, please click here.

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Itsuki Handoh Gives Online Lecture On Phosphorus and Chemical Pollution

Post Date July 03, 2013
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Category environmental change, online lectures

On Tuesday-Wednesday 25-26 June, GCRI hosted an online lecture by Itsuki Handoh titled ‘Phosphorus and Chemical Pollution as Global Catastrophic Risks’. (See the pre-lecture announcement.) Handoh is an Associate Professor at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto.

A starting point for the talk is recent research on planetary boundaries, describing nine global-scale environmental thresholds that, if crossed, could have very harmful effects.[1] The planetary boundaries paradigm has grown influential, especially in international environmental governance. For example, it was featured prominently in the report …

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Minimizing Global Catastrophic and Existential Risks from Emerging Technologies Through International Law

Post Date July 01, 2013
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Category law & policy, publications

View the paper “Minimizing Global Catastrophic and Existential Risks from Emerging Technologies Through International Law”

Mankind is rapidly developing “emerging technologies” in the fields of bioengineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence that have the potential to solve humanity’s biggest problems, such as curing all disease, extending human life, or mitigating massive environmental problems like climate change. However, if these emerging technologies are misused or have an unintended negative effect, the consequences could be enormous, potentially resulting in serious, global damage to humans (known as “global catastrophic harm”) …

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Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia

Post Date June 28, 2013
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Category nuclear war, publications

View the paper “Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia”

Inadvertent nuclear war as defined in this paper occurs when one nation mistakenly concludes that it is under attack and launches nuclear weapons in what it believes to be a counterattack. A US-Russia nuclear war would be a major global catastrophe since these countries still possess thousands of nuclear weapons. Despite the end of the Cold War, the risk remains. This paper develops a detailed mathematical “fault tree” …

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New Magazine Article ‘Making The Universe A Better Place’

Post Date June 28, 2013
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Category astrobiology, ethics, publications

One more quick announcement. I have a short magazine article Making The Universe A Better Place in the new issue of Current Exchange/Technophilic Magazine. (The link is for the full issue. There’s no direct link to my article yet.) The article presents an overview of the ethics of global catastrophic risk as it relates to astrobiology. Technophilic is a magazine for science and engineering students, and so the article tells my personal story of how I transitioned from an engineering grad student to someone active …

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New Paper: Ethics & Dual-Use Bioengineering

Post Date June 28, 2013
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Category emerging technologies, ethics, law & policy, publications

GCRI has a new academic paper out. The ethics of global catastrophic risk from dual-use bioengineering, by Seth Baum and Grant Wilson, has been accepted for publication in Ethics in Biology, Engineering and Medicine. The paper was written for a talk of the same title presented at the 7th Annual International Conference on Ethical Issues In Biomedical Engineering.

The paper discusses ethics and law issues raised by dual-use bioengineering. Dual-use technologies are technologies with both beneficial and harmful applications. Bioengineered technologies can be both very beneficial …

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