Maher Lecture Rescheduled For 1 August

Post Date July 18, 2013
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Category online lectures

Tim Maher’s online lecture has been rescheduled. The new time is Thursday 1 August 2013, at 17:00 GMT (13:00 New York, 18:00 London, 19:00 Amsterdam). The original lecture was cancelled due to a scheduling problem. Please RSVP to me if you would like to attend the new lecture. We apologize to everyone who has been inconvenienced by the rescheduling and we appreciate your patience.

Here is the updated talk info:

Ambient Intelligence: Implications for Global Environmental Change and Totalitarianism Risk
Thursday 1 August 2013, 17:00 GMT (13:00 New …

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Organization Directory Updates

Post Date July 17, 2013
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Category resources

Grant Wilson and I have gone through and updated the GCR organization directory. The directory now contains 130 organizations. The new entries are below. Please let us know if we may be missing any organizations.

Reflecting back on the seven months since the directory was originally published, it has proved quite useful. it has been used for job searches, general networking, and just to get a sense for the scope of the GCR community. This has been Exhibit A in our effort to dispel the somewhat …

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SRA 2013 GCR Sessions Announced

Post Date July 09, 2013
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The Society of Risk Analysis has just confirmed that our two global catastrophic risk sessions have been accepted for the 2013 SRA Annual Meeting. For full speaker & abstract info, please click here. For info on past SRA GCR sessions, please click here.

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July 2013 Newsletter

Post Date July 03, 2013
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Dear friends,

Happy Independence Day to all the Americans on the list. (And happy Canada Day/Fête du Canada, and everyone else now celebrating a National Day). It is an interesting and important moment for American democracy. Last month’s leak of information about the US National Security Agency’s large-scale surveillance program (here’s a good overview) provides a stark reminder of how communication and information technologies can be used to support those in power. But it is also a reminder that power exists in many forms, and that …

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Itsuki Handoh Gives Online Lecture On Phosphorus and Chemical Pollution

Post Date July 03, 2013
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Category environmental change, online lectures

On Tuesday-Wednesday 25-26 June, GCRI hosted an online lecture by Itsuki Handoh titled ‘Phosphorus and Chemical Pollution as Global Catastrophic Risks’. (See the pre-lecture announcement.) Handoh is an Associate Professor at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto.

A starting point for the talk is recent research on planetary boundaries, describing nine global-scale environmental thresholds that, if crossed, could have very harmful effects.[1] The planetary boundaries paradigm has grown influential, especially in international environmental governance. For example, it was featured prominently in the report …

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GCR News Summary June 2013

Post Date July 01, 2013
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U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius speaking to the World Health Assembly image courtesy of US Mission Geneva/Eric Bridiers.

“Every pandemic emergence seems to be a law unto itself.” David Morens, Jeffrey Taubenberger, and Anthony Fauci wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine that there’s no evidence viruses that develop one mutation that could lead them to becoming pandemic will necessarily develop any others. In fact, an important open question is whether any bird flu virus that infects humans could viably develop the …

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Minimizing Global Catastrophic and Existential Risks from Emerging Technologies Through International Law

Post Date July 01, 2013
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Category law & policy, publications

View the paper “Minimizing Global Catastrophic and Existential Risks from Emerging Technologies Through International Law”

Mankind is rapidly developing “emerging technologies” in the fields of bioengineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence that have the potential to solve humanity’s biggest problems, such as curing all disease, extending human life, or mitigating massive environmental problems like climate change. However, if these emerging technologies are misused or have an unintended negative effect, the consequences could be enormous, potentially resulting in serious, global damage to humans (known as “global catastrophic harm”) …

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Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia

Post Date June 28, 2013
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Category nuclear war, publications

View the paper “Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia”

Inadvertent nuclear war as defined in this paper occurs when one nation mistakenly concludes that it is under attack and launches nuclear weapons in what it believes to be a counterattack. A US-Russia nuclear war would be a major global catastrophe since these countries still possess thousands of nuclear weapons. Despite the end of the Cold War, the risk remains. This paper develops a detailed mathematical “fault tree” …

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New Magazine Article ‘Making The Universe A Better Place’

Post Date June 28, 2013
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Category astrobiology, ethics, publications

One more quick announcement. I have a short magazine article Making The Universe A Better Place in the new issue of Current Exchange/Technophilic Magazine. (The link is for the full issue. There’s no direct link to my article yet.) The article presents an overview of the ethics of global catastrophic risk as it relates to astrobiology. Technophilic is a magazine for science and engineering students, and so the article tells my personal story of how I transitioned from an engineering grad student to someone active …

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New Paper: Ethics & Dual-Use Bioengineering

Post Date June 28, 2013
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Category emerging technologies, ethics, law & policy, publications

GCRI has a new academic paper out. The ethics of global catastrophic risk from dual-use bioengineering, by Seth Baum and Grant Wilson, has been accepted for publication in Ethics in Biology, Engineering and Medicine. The paper was written for a talk of the same title presented at the 7th Annual International Conference on Ethical Issues In Biomedical Engineering.

The paper discusses ethics and law issues raised by dual-use bioengineering. Dual-use technologies are technologies with both beneficial and harmful applications. Bioengineered technologies can be both very beneficial …

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