FLI Artificial Superintelligence Project

Post Date July 01, 2015
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Category announcement, emerging technologies

I am writing to announce that GCRI has received a grant from the Future of Life Institute, with funding provided by Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy Project. The official announcement is here and the full list of awardees is here.

GCRI’s project team includes Tony Barrett, Roman Yampolskiy, and myself. Here is the project title and summary:

Evaluation of Safe Development Pathways for Artificial Superintelligence

Some experts believe that computers could eventually become a lot smarter than humans are. They call it artificial superintelligence, or ASI. If …

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GCR News Summary June 2015

Post Date June 29, 2015
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Solar flare image courtesy of NASA/SDO under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (image has been cropped)

Pope Francis issued an encyclical saying the natural environment is “the patrimony of all humanity” and calling for a “new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet”. Pope Francis warned that we are warming the planet, depleting its reserves of clean water, and destroying its biodiversity:

Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation …

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June Newsletter: The Winter-Safe Deterrence Controversy

Post Date June 22, 2015
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Category newsletter

Dear friends,

The last few months have gone well for GCRI. We have several new papers out, two new student affiliates, and some projects in the works that I hope to announce in an upcoming newsletter. Meanwhile, I’d like to share with you about a little controversy we recently found ourselves in.

The controversy surrounds a new research paper of mine titled Winter-safe deterrence: The risk of nuclear winter and its challenge to deterrence. The essence of winter-safe deterrence is to seek options for deterrence that would …

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Resilience to Global Food Supply Catastrophes

Post Date June 17, 2015
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View the paper “Resilience to Global Food Supply Catastrophes”

A global catastrophic risk is a risk of an event that would cause major harm to global human civilization. Many global catastrophic risks are risks of global food supply catastrophes because they threaten major disruption to global food supplies. These include risks of nuclear wars, volcanic eruptions, asteroid and comet impacts, abrupt climate change, and plant disease outbreaks. Global food supply catastrophes are an important class of global catastrophic risk. This paper studies how to make humanity …

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Risk and Resilience For Unknown, Unquantifiable, Systemic, and Unlikely/Catastrophic Threats

Post Date June 17, 2015
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View the paper “Risk and Resilience For Unknown, Unquantifiable, Systemic, and Unlikely/Catastrophic Threats”

Risk and resilience are important paradigms for guiding decisions made under uncertainty, in particular decisions about how to protect systems from threats. The risk paradigm tends to emphasize reducing the probabilities and magnitudes of potential losses. The resilience paradigm tends to emphasize increasing the ability of systems to retain critical functionality by absorbing the disturbance, adapting to it, or recovering from it. This paper discusses the suitability of each paradigm for threats that …

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GCR News Summary May 2015

Post Date June 01, 2015
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MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft image courtesy of the US Air Force/Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt

China has converted some of its long-range missiles to carry multiple warheads. China’s decision to retrofit its missiles with “multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles” (MIRVs) appears to be at least in part a response to the US expanding its missile defense in the Pacific. The US, the UK, France, and Russia already have missiles equipped with MIRVs. The New York Times noted in an editorial that because MIRVs can overwhelm missile defense systems, they increase …

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GCR News Summary April 2015

Post Date May 12, 2015
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US Secretary of State John Kerry addressing the Non-Proliferation Review Conference image courtesy of the US State Department

Angela Kane, the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, warned that the nuclear powers’ lack of meaningful progress toward disarmament could undermine the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). US Secretary of State John Kerry said at the NPT Review Conference that as of September, 2014 the US had 4,717 nuclear warheads—87 fewer than the year before. Kerry said that the US planned to accelerate dismantling its approximately 2,500 retired warheads by …

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GCR News Summary March 2015

Post Date April 03, 2015
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EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Lausanne image courtesy of the US State Department

Iran and the P5+1 countries—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—worked past a March 31 deadline to reach a framework agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Iran agreed to limit its uranium-enrichment program to producing low-enriched uranium with 6,104 older-generation centrifuges at a single site in Natanz. Iran also agreed to give up 97% of its existing stockpile of enriched uranium and …

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Winter-Safe Deterrence: The Risk of Nuclear Winter and Its Challenge to Deterrence

Post Date March 14, 2015
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Category nuclear war, publications

View the paper “Winter-Safe Deterrence: The Risk of Nuclear Winter and Its Challenge to Deterrence”

Eight countries have large nuclear arsenals: China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. North Korea might have a small nuclear arsenal. These countries have nuclear weapons for several reasons. Perhaps the biggest reason is deterrence. Nuclear deterrence means threatening other countries with nuclear weapons in order to persuade them not to attack. When nuclear deterrence works, it can help avoid nuclear war. However, nuclear deterrence …

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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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