James Hughes is the ED of IEET – He discusses the Russia/Ukraine conflict in relation to the history of NATO and Russia, the social democratic project. He then discusses global catastrophic risks of nuclear and biotech and the problems surrounding fake news. Audio:
Cancelling the Apocalypse – Why do civilizations collapse? And is our own civilization ripe for collapse? 2:19 Are we on the road to civilizational collapse? 11:01 Why we need global governance, not global government 18:20 The double-edged sword of civilizational complexity 24:11 The apocalyptic scenario Bob fears most 42:01 Luke: Not every problem has a…
San Harris (author of The Moral Landscape and host of the Waking Up podcast) discusses the need for AI Safety – while fun to think about, we are unable to “martial an appropriate emotional response” to improvements in AI and automation and the prospect of dangerous AI – it’s a failure of intuition to respond…
Understanding heavy-tailed distributions are important to assessing likelihoods and impact scales when thinking about possible disasters – especially relevant to xRisk and Global Catastrophic Risk analysis. How likely is civilization to be devastated by a large scale disaster or even go extinct? Anders discusses how heavy-tailed distributions account for more than our intuitions tell us….
One can think of Existential Risk as a subcategory of a Global Catastrophic Risk – while GCR’s are really bad, civilization has the potential to recover from such a global catastrophic disaster. An existential Risk is one in which there is no chance of recoverability. An example of the sort of disaster that fits the…
