November 2012 Newsletter

by | 2 November 2012

Yesterday GCRI sent out its monthly email newsletter. The main updates are reprinted below, slightly modified for the blog. To sign up for our newsletter, click here.

GCRI Releases Blogs & Newsfeeds Resource

To help the global catastrophic risk community stay up to date, GCRI has released a new blogs & newsfeeds resource, compiling 36 blogs and 18 newsfeeds related to catastrophic risk. Further details are available here. We expect to be releasing more resources in support of the global catastrophic risk community soon.

Katherine Thompson To Present On Psychology Of Uncertainty

For its first public lecture, GCRI will host Katherine Thompson, PhD student in Psychology at Columbia University and researcher with Columbia’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. Her talk is titled “What We Think About When We Think About Probability: How Our Experience Affects the Way We Perceive the Risk of Rare Events”. The talk will discuss psychology research as it relates to uncertainty and global catastrophic risk.

October Talks: Tony Barrett (Nuclear War), Wei Luo (Visual Analytics)

GCRI also hosted two talks in October.
* GCRI Director of Research Tony Barrett recently gave two presentations of a talk “Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War between the United States and Russia”. The first was to GCRI’s ongoing nuclear war discussion group. The second was to the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies as part of the Fall Conference of its Project on Nuclear Issues.
* Wei Luo presented his research to GCRI in a talk titled Geo-Social Visual Analytics with Applications to Catastrophic Risk Management, which included a detailed discussion of pandemics. Wei is a PhD candidate in Geography at Pennsylvania State University and researcher in Penn State’s GeoVISTA Center.

GCRI Welcomes New Research Associate Tuncay Alparslan

October brought GCRI one new affiliate, Research Associate Tuncay Alparslan. Tuncay is an Assistant Professor in Mathematics and Statistics at American University. He has been working with GCRI on a new integrated assessment model for global catastrophic risk, drawing on his expertise on heavy-tailed probability distributions and stochastic processes.

GCRI Begins “Meet The Team Tuesdays” Interview Series

To help get to know GCRI affiliates, we’ve launched a weekly series of interviews called “Meet the Team Tuesdays”. The first two online are Jacob Haqq-Misra and Tim Maher.

Author

Recent Publications

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Is climate change a global catastrophic risk? This paper, published in the journal Futures, addresses the question by examining the definition of global catastrophic risk and by comparing climate change to another severe global risk, nuclear winter. The paper concludes that yes, climate change is a global catastrophic risk, and potentially a significant one.

Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models

Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models

For over 50 years, experts have worried about the risk of AI taking over the world and killing everyone. The concern had always been about hypothetical future AI systems—until recent LLMs emerged. This paper, published in the journal Risk Analysis, assesses how close LLMs are to having the capabilities needed to cause takeover catastrophe.

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

Diversity is a major ethics concept, but it is remarkably understudied. This paper, published in the journal Inquiry, presents a foundational study of the ethics of diversity. It adapts ideas about biodiversity and sociodiversity to the overall category of diversity. It also presents three new thought experiments, with implications for AI ethics.

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Is climate change a global catastrophic risk? This paper, published in the journal Futures, addresses the question by examining the definition of global catastrophic risk and by comparing climate change to another severe global risk, nuclear winter. The paper concludes that yes, climate change is a global catastrophic risk, and potentially a significant one.

Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models

Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models

For over 50 years, experts have worried about the risk of AI taking over the world and killing everyone. The concern had always been about hypothetical future AI systems—until recent LLMs emerged. This paper, published in the journal Risk Analysis, assesses how close LLMs are to having the capabilities needed to cause takeover catastrophe.

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity

Diversity is a major ethics concept, but it is remarkably understudied. This paper, published in the journal Inquiry, presents a foundational study of the ethics of diversity. It adapts ideas about biodiversity and sociodiversity to the overall category of diversity. It also presents three new thought experiments, with implications for AI ethics.