October 2013 Newsletter

Post Date October 11, 2013
Comments Comments Closed
Author
Category newsletter

Dear friends,

The saying “anything is possible” isn’t quite true, but much more is possible than we sometimes might think. For example, it is now clear that United States Treasury bonds are not the risk-free investments they were long assumed to be. The risk-free assumption was rooted in a failure of imagination, a failure to recognize the possibilities of divided government. So too for many global catastrophic risks. Recent research on the economics of climate change has emphasized the importance of catastrophic outcomes outside the range …

Read More »

Miles Brundage Gives Online Lecture on Artificial General Intelligence

Post Date July 30, 2013
Comments 2 Comments
Author
Category emerging technologies, online lectures

On Thursday 25 July, GCRI hosted an online lecture by Miles Brundage entitled ‘A Social Science Perspective on Global Catastrophic Risk Debates: The Case of Artificial General Intelligence’. (See the pre-lecture announcement.) Brundage is a PhD student at Arizona State University’s Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, where he is affiliated with the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO). He also spent two years at the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, which funds promising early stage energy technologies.

Brundage’s lecture described how …

Read More »

GCR News Summary July 2013

Post Date July 28, 2013
Comments 15 Comments
Author
Category news summary

Artificially-colored MERS virus image courtesy of CSIRO.

ConceptNet, an artificial intelligence program developed by a team led by Catherine Havasi at the MIT Media Lab, performed as well as an average four-year-old on the information, vocabulary, and word reasoning portions of standard intelligence test. The program uses a crowdsourced semantic network—a database of statements of basic facts—to answer questions. Miles Brundage explained in Slate that the program did well on “precisely the parts of the test that one would expect computers to excel …

Read More »

Miles Brundage To Deliver Online Lecture On Social Science And Artificial General Intelligence 25 July

Post Date June 03, 2013
Comments Comments Closed
Author
Category emerging technologies, law & policy, online lectures

This is the pre-event announcement for an online lecture by Miles Brundage, a PhD student in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona State University.

Here is the full talk info:

A Social Science Perspective on Global Catastrophic Risk Debates: The Case of Artificial General Intelligence
Thursday 25 July 2013, 17:00 GMT (10:00 Los Angeles, 13:00 New York, 18:00 London)
To be held online via Skype or equivalent. RSVP required by email to Seth Baum (seth [at] gcrinstitute.org). Space is limited.

Abstract: Researchers at institutions such as …

Read More »

GCRI’s First Publication, On Emerging Technologies And International Law, By Grant Wilson

Post Date November 27, 2012
Comments 7 Comments
Author
Category emerging technologies, law & policy, publications

As part of its research, GCRI is working on several research papers for peer-reviewed publication. The first of these papers has now been accepted, and so we are adding a publications page to our website. We will be adding more publications to this page as they become available.

The first paper, by Grant Wilson, is titled “Minimizing global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies through international law“. The paper has been accepted at Virginia Environmental Law Journal and can be downloaded from the Social Science …

Read More »
Newer Entries »