GCRI Welcomes Project Manager and Research Assistant McKenna Fitzgerald

Post Date May 07, 2020
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Category announcement

I am delighted to announce GCRI’s newest team member, McKenna Fitzgerald, who will serve as GCRI’s Project Manager and Research Assistant. Ms. Fitzgerald was selected through a competitive search process and we are excited to have her joining our team. Her initial focus will be on GCRI’s ongoing AI projects.

Until recently, Ms. Fitzgerald worked as Director of Academic Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in San Francisco. Her work there focused on facilitating partnerships between government, academia, and industry on AI …

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GCRI Receives $250,000 for 2020 Work on AI

Post Date December 18, 2019
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Category announcement

I am delighted to announce that GCRI has received a new $250,000 donation from Gordon Irlam that will fund GCRI’s work on AI in 2020. Irlam had previously made a donation of the same amount a year ago, also for AI work.

Irlam explains why he made the donation this way:

“Technical AGI safety is an emerging field. Whether its recommendations to make AGI safe are heeded or ignored carries tremendous weight for the future. Having these recommendations heeded is fundamentally is a social, political, and …

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2019 Annual Report

Post Date November 26, 2019
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Category discussion, planning

2019 has been a year of growth for GCRI. We have made good progress toward our goal, announced last year, of scaling up the organization so we can do more to reduce global catastrophic risk. We have also completed work on ongoing global catastrophic risk projects. We are especially happy with the advising and collaboration program we ran this year, through which we helped many people advance their work on global catastrophic risk while demonstrating how GCRI can operate at a larger scale.

Last year, we …

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Summary of 2019 Advising and Collaboration Program

Post Date November 18, 2019
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Category outreach

In May, GCRI put out an open call for people interested in seeking our advice and/or collaborating with us on projects. This was a new initiative for us, enabled by funding we received last year. It was also a bit of an experiment: we did not know how much interest there would be, or how constructive it would be either for the advisees/collaborators or for us.

We are
quite happy with how the advising/collaboration program turned out. We received
inquiries from many talented people from around the …

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The Challenge of Analyzing Global Catastrophic Risks

Post Date July 29, 2019
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Category announcement, articles, risk analysis

View the paper “The Challenge of Analyzing Global Catastrophic Risks”

The quantification of global catastrophic risks in terms of their probabilities and severities is difficult, but it is important for many decisions. Likewise, the fields of risk and decision analysis have much to offer the study of global catastrophic risk. This short paper summarizes the challenge of quantitatively analyzing global catastrophic risks. I was invited by the Decision Analysis Society to write this for their publication Decision Analysis Today.

As the paper explains, the quantification of global …

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Risk-Risk Tradeoff Analysis of Nuclear Explosives for Asteroid Deflection

Post Date June 17, 2019
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Category announcement, articles, asteroids, nuclear war, risk analysis

View the paper “Risk-Risk Tradeoff Analysis of Nuclear Explosives for Asteroid Deflection”

If an asteroid is found to be on collision course with Earth, it may be possible to deflect it away. One way of deflecting asteroids would be to use nuclear explosives. A nuclear deflection program may reduce the risk of an asteroid collision, but it might also inadvertently increase the risk of nuclear war or other violent conflict. This paper analyzes this potential tradeoff and evaluates its policy implications. The paper is published in …

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Evaluating Future Nanotechnology: The Net Societal Impacts of Atomically Precise Manufacturing

Post Date April 02, 2019
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Category publications

View the paper “Evaluating Future Nanotechnology: The Net Societal Impacts of Atomically Precise Manufacturing”

Atomically precise manufacturing (APM) is the assembly of materials with atomic precision. APM does not currently exist, and may not be feasible, but if it is feasible, then the societal impacts could be dramatic. This paper assesses the net societal impacts of APM across the full range of important APM sectors: general material wealth, environmental issues, military affairs, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and space travel. Positive effects were found for material wealth, the …

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GCRI Welcomes Special Advisor Jared Brown

Post Date March 27, 2019
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Category announcement

I am delighted to announce GCRI’s newest team member, Jared Brown, who will serve as GCRI’s Special Advisor for Government Affairs. Mr. Brown will assist GCRI in particular with our policy outreach, mainly with the United States government. Outreach is a growing focus for GCRI, and Mr. Brown’s assistance will be of tremendous value for this. (For further detail on our outreach, please see Summary of GCRI’s 2018-2019 Accomplishments, Plans, and Fundraising.)

Until recently, Mr. Brown worked at the US Congressional Research Service, developing a very …

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Reflections on the Risk Analysis of Nuclear War

Post Date February 15, 2019
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Category articles, nuclear war, risk analysis

View the paper “Reflections on the Risk Analysis of Nuclear War”

Would the world be safer with or without nuclear weapons? On one hand, nuclear weapons may increase the severity of war due to their extreme explosive power. On the other hand, they may decrease the frequency of major wars by strengthening deterrence. Is the decrease in frequency enough to offset the increase in severity? (This tradeoff is illustrated in the graphic above.) This is a vital policy question for which risk analysis has …

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BBC On Short-Termism And Long-Term Trajectories

Post Date January 31, 2019
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Category aftermath, ethics, media coverage, post-catastrophe

Richard Fisher of the BBC has published a detailed and thoughtful article The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat. The article covers the widespread tendency across contemporary society to focus on very short-term issues and several efforts to promote more long-term thinking and action. The article includes a detailed discussion of the research paper Long-term trajectories of human civilization, which I am lead author of. The BBC article includes each of the four types of trajectories covered in the Long-term trajectories paper (and illustrated in …

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