GCR News Summary October 2014

Post Date November 04, 2014
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Mars image courtesy of CDC Global under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

In October, Ebola spread to the US, Spain, and Mali. The US had its first local case when a Liberian man—who may have lied both to airport officials and to health care workers about his contact with an infected person—came down with the disease in Dallas. Two nurses in Dallas contracted the disease after treating the man. A New York doctor also came down with the disease …

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GCR News Summary September/August 2014

Post Date October 01, 2014
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Medical facility in Kailahun, Sierra Leone image courtesy of EC/ECHO/Cyprien Fabre under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) projected that in the worst case scenario if more isn’t done to stop the spread of Ebola, there could be 1.4 million cases by the end of January 2015. Maia Majumder estimated that around 80% of people who contract this strain of Ebola eventually die. There is currently no proven effective treatment or vaccine for …

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Film Review: Transcendence

Post Date September 24, 2014
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View the paper “Film Review: Transcendence” 

Is it possible to create an artificial mind? Can a human or other biological mind be uploaded into computer hardware? Should these sorts of artificial intelligences be created, and under what circumstances? Would the AIs make the world better off? These and other deep but timely questions are raised by the recent film Transcendence(dir. Wally Pfister, 2014). In this review, I will discuss some of the questions raised by the film and show their importance to real-world decision making about AI and …

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Integrating the Planetary Boundaries and Global Catastrophic Risk Paradigms

Post Date August 24, 2014
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View the paper “Integrating the Planetary Boundaries and Global Catastrophic Risk Paradigms”

Planetary boundaries (PBs) and global catastrophic risk (GCR) are two paradigms that have emerged in recent years to study major global threats to humanity and nature. PBs focuses on threats that can push the global Earth system into fundamentally different states, with unacceptable consequences for humanity. GCR focuses on threats that can cause the permanent collapse of global human civilization or even human extinction, including environmental threats and other threats. PBs and GCR come …

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Summer Newsletter: New Publications

Post Date August 21, 2014
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Dear friends,

There have been a number of interesting new publications coming out of the GCR research community recently, both from GCRI and elsewhere. They cover a range of topics, from environmental risks to artificial intelligence to refuges for protecting against unknown threats. For your interest, I’m putting a summary of the publications down at the bottom of the newsletter. These are good times for GCR research, and they are about to get better next year when the Futures special issue comes out. That is, assuming …

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Book Review: Only One Chance

Post Date August 20, 2014
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View the paper “Book Review: Only One Chance”

Review of: Philippe Grandjean. Only One Chance: How Environmental Pollution Impairs Brain Development – and How to Protect the Brains of the Next Generation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Humans have lived with chemical pollution for thousands of years, but the recent proliferation of industrial chemicals poses novel threats. In the new book Only One Chance, distinguished environmental health researcher Philippe Grandjean argues for special attention to developmental neurotoxicology, i.e. to the effects of chemical pollution on the developing human brain …

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GCR News Summary July 2014

Post Date July 30, 2014
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Boy with smallpox image courtesy of the CDC Public Health Image Library

Workers found vials containing the smallpox virus in a storage room at a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The vials appear to have been in the laboratory since the 1950s. They were moved to a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) containment laboratory shortly after they were discovered. The CDC said that there was no sign the vials …

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GCR News Summary June 2014

Post Date July 01, 2014
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Dominion power plant image courtesy of Ed Brown under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Russia has lost contact with its only missile detection satellite in geostationary orbit above the US. The satellite was originally supposed to operate until at least 2017, but began malfunctioning shortly after its launch in 2012. Russia still has two remaining missile detection satellites in elliptical orbits around the planet, but they are reportedly able to monitor US missile activity …

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GCR News Summary May 2014

Post Date June 02, 2014
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Pope Francis image courtesy of Jeffrey Bruno/Aleteia under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Billionaire Petro Poroshenko won the Ukrainian presidential election with 55% of the vote. Voter turnout was high, although pro-Russian separatists prevented many people from voting in the eastern part of the country. Poroshenko promised to bring peace to the eastern regions and move the country closer to the European Union. Russia said that it was moving its forces away from the …

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May Newsletter: Report From The United Nations

Post Date June 02, 2014
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This was sent via email on 13 May. Click here to subscribe to the email newsletter.

Dear friends,

Last month I gave two talks at the United Nations. The first was a small meeting of experts from the P5, i.e. the permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, France, Russia, UK, and USA. I presented new research on nuclear winter risk. The second was at the big annual meeting for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). I presented the paper Analyzing and reducing the risks of inadvertent …

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