Dear friends,
It is my pleasure to announce that longtime GCRI Associate Robert de Neufville has been promoted to the position of Director of Communications. Robert will oversee GCRI’s website and newsletter, as well as lead a renewed media outreach program. He also joinsTony Barrett, Grant Wilson, and myself on GCRI’s leadership team. Robert’s work is funded through a donation GCRI recently secured from Pattern, an AI company that, like GCRI, has a “geographically decentralized” structure in which workers can live anywhere in the world. We are grateful to Pattern for their generous support.
As always, thank you for your interest in our work. We welcome any comments, questions, and criticisms you may have.
Sincerely,
Seth Baum, Executive Director
GCR News Summaries
Our news summaries cover events across the breadth of GCR topics, including nuclear disarmament, climate change, artificial intelligence, and infectious diseases. Here are our summaries for the months of February, March, April, May.
Nuclear Winter Paper Nominated for Bernard Brodie Prize
GCRI Executive Director Seth Baum’s paper, “Winter-safe deterrence: The risk of nuclear winter and its challenge to deterrence,” was nominated for the Bernard Brodie Prize, which is awarded annually to an outstanding paper published in Contemporary Security Policy.
Nuclear War Risk
GCRI Director of Research Tony Barrett wrote about the risk of an inadvertent nuclear war between the US and Russia for RAND Perspectives.
Artificial Intelligence
GCRI Director of Research Tony Barrett and Seth Baum published a paper in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence presenting “A model of pathways to artificial superintelligence catastrophe for risk and decision analysis.”
GCRI recently launched a new working paper series with a paper by Seth Baum “On the promotion of safe and socially beneficial artificial intelligence”. The paper discusses how to motivate AI researchers to choose socially beneficial designs, with an emphasis on the social psychology of AI researchers.
Roman Yampolskiy published a paper titled “Unethical research: How to create a malevolent artificial intelligence” in arXiv. The paper was presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-16), Ethics for Artificial Intelligence Workshop (AI-Ethics-2016). The paper has been covered in MIT Technology Review and elsewhere.
Food Supply Catastrophes
Seth Baum, Dave Denkenberger, and Joshua Pearce have a paper on “Alternative foods as a solution to to global food supply catastrophes” in Solutions.
In August and September, Dave Denkenberger is also giving a series of presentations on his research on global food supply catastrophes. Dave will be speaking at Effective Altruism Global (EA Global), the 6th International Disaster and Risk Conference (IDRC), the Cambridge University Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), Effective Altruism London, and the Oxford University Future of Humanity Institute (FHI). Details are available at the GCRI Speaking Engagements page.
The Ethics of Outer Space
Seth Baum’s paper, “The ethics of outer space: A consequentialist perspective.” will be published in the forthcoming book The Ethics of Space Exploration, edited by James S.J. Schwartz and Tony Milligan.
Popular Articles
Seth Baum and Dave Denkenberger were interviewed for Science Magazine on how the world could end.
Kaitlin Butler wrote about the fight to stop the development of fossil fuel infrastructure inThe Leap.
Recent Events
“What’s the Big Idea?”, a panel discussion with Seth Baum of GCRI and Konstantinos Karachalios of IEEE at the Soho House. 14 March 2016, New York City.
