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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Summer Newsletter: New Publications

Post Date August 21, 2014
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Category newsletter, publications

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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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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GCR News Summary March 2014

Post Date April 02, 2014
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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 …

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GCR News Summary February 2014

Post Date February 28, 2014
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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 …

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GCR News Summary January 2014

Post Date January 30, 2014
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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 …

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GCR News Summary October 2013

Post Date October 31, 2013
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Indian flying fox image courtesy of Fritz Geller-Grimm under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 Generic license.

The US federal government shut down for 16 days when Congress failed to authorize funds for the 2014 fiscal year. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) furloughed two-thirds of its employees, which left it without enough staff to monitor safety procedures at high-security biolabs, watch for outbreaks of potential pandemics, or respond to a major public health emergency. During the shutdown 338 people in 18 …

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New Review Of AI Risk Book Our Final Invention

Post Date October 14, 2013
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Category emerging technologies, publications

Quick fyi – I have a review of Our Final Invention by James Barrat. The review is titled Our Final Invention: Is AI the Defining Issue for Humanity? and has been published at Scientific American Blogs. There is also a reprint at Yahoo News. It’s a very readable book, a good introduction to AI risk for people new to the topic, but also something that experts will also learn something from.

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