This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.
This past June, I was getting ready for a trip overseas when I get an email from a recent law school graduate interested in global catastrophic risk and looking for career suggestions. I was immediately intrigued. Legal thinking has an important role to play in GCR, but not many people in law gravitate to GCR. (See discussion in Arden Rowell’s Meet The Team interview.) Grant was so interested in GCR that he wanted career advice on it. And he had studied international environmental law (at Lewis & Clark, one of the top environmental law programs), which is of direct relevance to GCR. And he had written a paper on international law and GCR from emerging technologies. And the paper was pretty good. It reminded me of the better parts of Richard Posner’s book Catastrophe: Risk and Response. So I was delighted to make Grant’s acquaintance. Flash forward a few months and Grant has become central to much of GCRI’s activities. His emerging technologies paper, Minimizing global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies through international law, is now GCRI’s first publication. He’s spearheaded several fundraising efforts that are helping take GCRI forwards. Grant’s efforts and enthusiasm is a big reason why I think GCRI can succeed. – Seth
Seth Baum: Grant, I’m actually still not sure exactly how you became interested in GCR, and how you found GCRI. What’s the story?
Grant Wilson: I originally went to law school because I saw international law and the best forum for me to tackle some of the world’s biggest environmental challenges—climate change, biodiversity loss, mass extinction, unsustainable resource consumption, and so forth. As it turned out, many of these massive environmental challenges present GCRs, so I already had a lot of experience by the time I connected all the dots. My climate change work had an especially large impact on me. I represented certain small island states at the 2010 Climate Change Conference in Cancun, so watching the international community stall on reducing greenhouse gas emissions with sea levels rising was like watching these small islands drown in slow motion. This motivated me to work on reducing large-scale catastrophes.
Meanwhile, I have always followed emerging technologies in the news, and the deep ecologist in me is concerned that innovations like synthetic biology could irreversibly harm the sanctity of the earth’s environment. I paid close attention as Craig Venter created what was possibly the first synthetic organism and as nanotechnology became widespread on the marketplace (at least in terms of nanomaterials). Then, as I began to focus on international law issues, I realized that the dangerous aspects of emerging technologies should perhaps be regulated internationally to protect society from global catastrophes. By this point, I was delving into GCR literature, and I have been passionate about exploring and solving GCR issues ever since.
I believe that I found GCRI and the work of Seth Baum literally by doing a Google search of “global catastrophic risks”. In the future, I think that people will just know of GCRI without even having to poke around, sort of how people know that the Council on Foreign Relations is the place to start looking at many international relations issues.
Seth Baum: I enjoyed your paper on emerging technologies. What would you say is the core idea behind the paper?
Grant Wilson: The core idea behind the paper is that emerging technologies (in the paper I discuss bioengineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence) present global catastrophic risks to mankind, but they are not effectively regulated at the international level. Since dangerous emerging technologies in any single country have the potential to harm every other country in the world, global action is required. Therefore, the international community should create international laws that protect the world from the dangerous aspects of emerging technologies without stifling their development for useful purposes, like solving climate change.
Seth Baum: My main criticism of the paper is that it doesn’t address the challenge of getting nations to comply with treaties restricting the development of emerging technologies, especially when they have great incentive to ignore the treaties and develop them anyways. How would you respond to this? Is there any hope?
Grant Wilson: Obviously this is very difficult. Many treaties are less effective because some countries refuse to commit to them. The United States has a particularly poor record: they have not ratified the Law of the Sea Convention, the Kyoto Protocol (for climate change), the Biological Weapons Convention, or the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, amongst others. And even if all countries do agree to a treaty, there is often a gap between a country’s international obligations and their domestic actions.
However, getting all countries to agree to an international treaty to regulate emerging technologies would be a great start. This would probably require massive public pressure, which I think is inevitable as the ethics of using novel emerging technologies becomes a global debate, and perhaps a looming danger of a global catastrophe. Beyond this initial step, a lot of a treaty’s effectiveness depends on how it is constructed. For example, a treaty with very specific obligations is more effective then a treaty with broad, ambiguous requirements. Furthermore, a treaty that strongly deters noncompliance and has an effective system to settle disputes provides strong incentives for countries to comply with a treaty (an example is the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Understanding), whereas a treaty with weak deterrents like the Kyoto Protocol is less effective.
Seth Baum: You’ve been living in Portland, OR. I visited Portland once – beautiful city. It has a reputation of caring deeply about environmental issues. Do you see this translating into concern for GCR in general? Or perhaps environmental GCRs resonate in ways that the others don’t?
Grant Wilson: Indeed Portland is beautiful—and just as strange as Portlandia makes it out to be. Portland does care deeply about environmental issues, but I would say that most of the city is most concerned with the local environmental movement. After that, many people are also very interested in climate change and environmental GCRs because Portland has a huge population of genuine environmentalists (the armies of bicyclers riding around in the freezing cold rain attests to this). That being said, I definitely know some individuals in Portland who are interested in all GCRs. I also think that people here embrace the activism spirit and would rally around ways to reduce GCRs.
Seth Baum: OK, sales pitch time. You’ve been working with me on GCRI’s fundraising. In your view, why should someone donate to GCRI?
Grant Wilson: People should donate to GCRI because we do innovative work that no other organization is doing to reduce the chances that a global catastrophe will occur. The damage from a global catastrophe would be massive, literally killing at least tens of millions of people and possibly even causing human extinction. Meanwhile, many GCRs are becoming increasingly dangerous. Therefore, donations to GCRI perhaps give you the biggest bang for your buck because you are helping mankind tackle the greatest challenges of our time. Finally, I should mention that the GCRI staff includes some of the brightest minds in the world, not to mention that everyone is truly passionate about the work of our organization. In other words, your donation will not be squandered.
Seth Baum: Let’s end with a message for law students, and for undergraduates considering law school. What would you tell them about GCR, and about how they can get involved?
Grant Wilson: Listen up, present and future law students. GCR is hugely important to consider before a global catastrophe occurs, and there is a ton of work that lawyers who focus on either domestic or international law can do to reduce GCR. Global catastrophic risks are pervasive in the legal field—take a look at U.S. regulations on handling deadly viruses, international treaties on biological weapons, banking laws meant to prevent financial collapse, U.S. and international laws that attempt to mitigate climate change, and so forth. You may find this field incredibly rewarding if you want to do work that has never been done before rather than drafting contracts or performing other traditional legal functions. If you are a present or future lawyer reading this and are even vaguely interested in some aspect of GCR, I strongly urge you to contact me to talk about GCR lawyering.
