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GCR News Summary April 2014

Post Date May 09, 2014

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Soap and chlorine image courtesy of UNICEF Guinea under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Tensions continued to run high between Russia and the acting government of Ukraine as well-armed pro-Russian groups occupied strategic buildings across eastern Ukraine and skirmished with the Ukrainian military. An agreement between Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the EU to lower tensions fell apart when separatists captured military observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and …

March-April 2014 Newsletter

Post Date April 23, 2014

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Author Seth Baum

Category newsletter

Dear friends,

I am pleased to announce the call for papers for a new special issue of the journal Futures titled Confronting Future Catastrophic Threats To Humanity. I will be co-editing this together with my colleague Bruce Tonn of the University of Tennessee. Over the years, Futures has probably published more research on global catastrophic risk than any other journal, including a special issue on human extinction that Tonn co-edited in 2009. It is an honor to be working with Tonn and Futures on a new …

GCR News Summary March 2014

Post Date April 02, 2014

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Author Robert de Neufville

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US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman at Maidan Memorial in Kyiv image courtesy of the US Embassy in Kyiv under a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License

On March 18, Russia formally annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea. Russian troops without official markings occupied the Crimean peninsula earlier in the month after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country. The Crimean peninsula was part of Russia before it was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. Crimea is …

GCR News Summary February 2014

Post Date February 28, 2014

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Author Robert de Neufville

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Smiling camel image courtesy of Hendrik Dacquin under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil said at a CIO Network conference that we will develop “human-level” artificial intelligence by the year 2029. Kurzweil—who argued in his book The Singularity Is Near that advances in artificial intelligence will lead to runaway technological progress in the near future—predicted that artificial intelligence systems would also be used to enhance human intelligence. Kurzweil also suggested we …

January-February 2014 Newsletter

Post Date February 28, 2014

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Author Seth Baum

Category newsletter

Dear friends,

2014 is shaping up to be a busy year for the GCR community. It is encouraging that GCR is getting increasing attention, and that leaders of the GCR community are getting increasing recognition for our work. I personally have been honored by several prestigious speaking opportunities and a full profile in a new Scientific American Blogs article Evaluating the Risk of Events That Could End Civilization. The speaking opportunities will send me flying around the world in March, for events in Stockholm and Tokyo. …

Deepwater Horizon and the Law of the Sea: Was the Cure Worse than the Disease?

Post Date January 31, 2014

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Author Seth Baum

Category publications

View the paper “Deepwater Horizon and the Law of the Sea: Was the Cure Worse than the Disease?”

The number 4.9 million is commonly known as the number of barrels of crude oil that entered the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. Less known, but perhaps equally disconcerting, is the number 1.7 million—the number of gallons of Corexit, a toxic dispersant used to mitigate oil spills, that was also released into the Gulf of Mexico. Some observers claim that Corexit spared …

GCR News Summary January 2014

Post Date January 30, 2014

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Author Robert de Neufville

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President Obama delivering the 2014 State of the Union address image courtesy of The White House/Pete Souza

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decided to leave the small hand of its symbolic “Doomsday Clock” at five minutes to midnight. The amount of time left until midnight represents how close we are to global disaster. The clock’s hands were set at two minutes to midnight at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s. In an open letter to the members of …

DHS Emerging Technologies Project

Post Date January 29, 2014

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Author Seth Baum

Category emerging technologies, law & policy

I am writing to announce a new GCRI project on risks from emerging technologies. The project is sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security under its Science & Technology Directorate Centers of Excellence, through the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE), which is based at the University of Southern California.

The project’s Principal Investigator is GCRI Director of Research Tony Barrett. Contributions are also coming from our colleague Jun Zhuang, Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at SUNY-Buffalo, and …

KVA Emerging Technologies Event

Post Date January 21, 2014

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Author Seth Baum

Category emerging technologies, events

On 17 March 2014, Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien (KVA, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) is hosting an event Emerging technologies and the future of humanity. I will give a talk “The great downside dilemma for risky emerging technologies”, loosely based on themes from my recent paper Double catastrophe: Intermittent stratospheric geoengineering induced by societal collapse. Usually I try to avoid travel like this, but this is a good event and they wouldn’t let me present remotely. Here’s my abstract:

The great downside dilemma for risky emerging technologies
Many …

The Ethics of Global Catastrophic Risk from Dual-Use Bioengineering

Post Date January 04, 2014

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Author Seth Baum

Category ethics, publications

View the paper “The Ethics of Global Catastrophic Risk from Dual-Use Bioengineering”

Dual-use technologies are technologies that can be used in both beneficial and harmful ways. Some technologies produced through biological engineering (bioengineering) are dual-use. Of all the possible harms from dual-use technologies, global catastrophic risk is a significant concern. Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are risks of events that could significantly harm or even destroy civilization at the global scale. This paper discusses ethical issues raised by those bioengineered technologies that pose a GCR. The paper …

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