BBC On Short-Termism And Long-Term Trajectories

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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GCRI Receives $250,000 Donation For AI Research And Outreach

I am delighted to announce that GCRI has received a $250,000 donation from Gordon Irlam, to be used for GCRI’s research and outreach on artificial intelligence. The donation will be used mainly to fund Robert de Neufville and myself during 2019.

The donation is a major first step toward GCRI’s goal of raising $1.5 million to enable the organization to start scaling up. Our next fundraising priority is to bring GCRI Director of Research Tony Barrett on full-time, and possibly also one other senior hire whom …

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December Newsletter: A Turning Point For GCRI

Dear friends,

We believe that GCRI may now be at a turning point. Having established ourselves as leaders in the field of global catastrophic risk, we now seek to scale up the organization so that we can do correspondingly more to address global catastrophic risk. To that end, we have published detailed records of our accomplishments, plans for future work, and financial needs. An overview of this information is contained in our new blog post, Summary of GCRI’s 2018-2019 Accomplishments, Plans, and Fundraising.

To begin scaling up, we …

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2018 Annual Report

GCRI may now be at a turning point. We have established ourselves as leaders of the field of global catastrophic risk, with an important and distinctive role centered on the development of intelligent and practical solutions to reduce the risks. We have built up a solid track record of accomplishments of basic research and outreach to translate research ideas into action. However, we are not accomplishing nearly as much as we could because we currently only have the resources to operate at a small scale. …

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GCRI 2018-2019 Financial Position

GCRI has long been doing excellent work at a small scale. Some recent work is summarized in our blog post on 2018 accomplishments. However, we have been very limited by a lack of robust funding. We could do much more if we had the funding needed to scale up. Therefore, GCRI is now trying to raise a larger amount of funding than in the past. Specifically, we are currently seeking a total of $1.5 million. Anyone interested in contributing to this can do so via …

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GCRI 2019 Plans: Organization Development

GCRI may now be at a turning point. We have spent years advancing our understanding of global catastrophic risk, assessing the best role for our organization, and developing the capacity to grow the organization and its impact on the risks. We have established ourselves as leaders of global catastrophic risk scholarship and of the wider community that works on global catastrophic risk. GCRI has an important and distinctive role to play on global catastrophic risk. We believe the time has come for GCRI to scale …

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GCRI 2018 Accomplishments

2018 has been a productive year for GCRI across a range of areas: research, outreach, mentoring, and organization development. Or rather, it has been productive relative to our current rate of funding. As discussed below, we could do a lot more if funds were available, and much of our current work is on raising those funds and ensuring that they are put to the best use. GCRI has an important and distinctive role to play on global catastrophic risk and we believe that the risks …

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Resilience To Global Catastrophe

View the paper “Resilience To Global Catastrophe”

One of the most important questions in the study of global catastrophic risk is how resilient global human civilization is to catastrophes. At stake here is what range of events could cause global catastrophe, and likewise how wide the scope of work on global catastrophic risk should be. A resilient civilization would only fall to a narrow range of catastrophes, and our focus could be correspondingly narrow. This short paper summarizes the state of knowledge on resilience to global …

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GCRI 2019 Plans: Global Catastrophic Risk Topics

GCRI’s ultimate aim is to develop the best ways of reducing global catastrophic risk. We recognize that global catastrophic risk is a complex and multifaceted issue area, and we do not start with any sweeping assumptions about what the best ways of reducing the risk may be. Instead, we work across a range of risks in order to identify the best opportunities. (In principle, we aspire to work across all of the risks, but at this time we can only work on some.) This is …

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The Role of Risk and Decision Analysis in Global Catastrophic Risk Reduction

This post provides some general discussion on how we at GCRI currently view risk and decision analysis. It has long been a major theme for our work, but it is somewhat controversial in our own minds. This post shares our current thinking in order to prompt wider discussion of these important but challenging research tools.

GCRI is a leader in the use of risk and decision analysis to understand global catastrophic risk. Risk analysis is the process of characterizing and perhaps quantifying the probabilities and severities …

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