The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk

Responsibility and Inequality in a Risky World w/Prof Heather Douglas DESCRIPTION We live in a world full of emerging risk. We generate new capacities with the potential to reorder our world and we discover new risks from old practices. What responsibilities come with doing this work? How should we manage the attendant risks? I will describe the nature and boundaries of responsibility for the new in a risky world, and I will argue that the responsibility to think through the risks that come with our knowledge production can never be fully removed from the experts doing that work, even if such responsibility can (and in many cases should) be shared. Further, the responsibility to work to avoid existential risks should make the fight for social justice and against inequality central to decisions about how to pursue projects. I will describe why tackling inequality is required, particularly as technological capacities increase. About the speaker Prof Douglas, University of Waterloo, is a philosopher of science who focuses on the proper understanding of science given its important role in public policy. She has a particular interests in the role of values in scientific reasoning, the epistemic constraints which could help us weigh complex sets of evidence, the history of philosophy of science in the 20th century, and how to theorise science as a process embedded in society. (Read more here: http://uwaterloo.academia.edu/HeatherDouglas)

Deep Learning: Artificial Intelligence Meets Human Intelligence DESCRIPTION Deep learning is based on technical advances made by the neural network revolution in the 1980’s. Why did it take so long for neural networks to recognise speech and objects in images at human levels? What were the breakthroughs that made deep learning possible? Which industries will deep learning disrupt and how will deep learning change your life? These are some of the issues that this public lecture will explore. About the speaker Prof Terrence Sejnowski received his PhD in physics from Princeton University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and the Harvard Medical School. He served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and was a Wiersma Visiting Professor of Neurobiology and a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech. He is now an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and holds the Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He is also a Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he is co-director of the Institute for Neural Computation and co-director of the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. He is a pioneer in computational neuroscience and his goal is to understand the principles that link brain to behaviour. His laboratory uses both experimental and modelling techniques to study the biophysical properties of synapses and neurons and the population dynamics of large networks of neurons. New computational models and new analytical tools have been developed to understand how the brain represents the world and how new representations are formed through learning algorithms for changing the synaptic strengths of connections between neurons. He has published over 500 scientific papers and 12 books, including The Computational Brain, with Patricia Churchland. Dr Sejnowski is the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Foundation, which organises an annual conference attended by over 6000 researchers in machine learning and neural computation and is the founding editor-in-chief of Neural Computation published by the MIT Press. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, one of only ten current scientists elected to all three national academies.

It is often remarked that the significant drivers of climate change include not only high and rising levels of fossil fuel use per person, but also high and rising human population size. The logic behind this remark appears at first sight to be simple: climate change is driven by emissions, and total emissions are equal to per-capita emissions multiplied by population, so of course (one might think) higher population will lead to more climate change. Professor Hilary Greaves will argue that given a proper understanding of the physics of climate change, this simple argument is flawed. High population may indeed be damaging for reasons related to climate change, but if so, the reasons for this are more subtle; she will outline what they might be. Professor Greaves' current research focusses on various issues in ethics and include: Foundational issues in consequentialism, issues of aggregation, population ethics, effective altruism, the interface between ethics and economics, the analogies between ethics and epistemology, and formal epistemology.

Science gives us a collective awareness that turns unknown unknowns into probabilities and helps us deal with risks and avoid catastrophic scenarios. It is worth distinguishing three levels of collective awareness, that involve understanding the external environment, our effect on the environment, and our collective effect on ourselves. This lecture will focus on the hardest of these — our collective effect on ourselves — and on economics in particular. The economy underpins almost everything we do, and economic fluctuations cost the world many tens of trillions of dollars, yet the budget for polar research is greater than that for economics. Why is there no large-scale effort to better understand the economy? Professor J. Doyne Farmer (Oxford Martin School) will argue that our lack of making a serious effort and our lack of progress is due to fundamental problems with the current culture of economics, and macroeconomics in particular. He will present an alternative vision of the economics of the future, with a much stronger emphasis on our ability to simulate the world. This will give us a better day-to-day understanding of the economy, but most importantly, it will allow us to better use science to think about the big problems in our future, such as climate change, the digital economy, and the overarching changes to human existence that the bio, info, nano and cognitive technologies of the future will bring. Professor Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His current research is in economics, including agent-based modelling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to the United Bank of Switzerland in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology.

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Managing Emerging Risks – Where Next? The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond. Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas: • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities • Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes: • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks • There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks

Abstract Professor Katyal, one of the top US Supreme Court advocates as well as the Paul Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University, will contrast European and American approaches to data privacy, digital security, and transparency, with an eye on recent groundbreaking cases in the United States. He has represented most of the top technology companies in the Apple Iphone San Bernadino decryption case, as well as in the Microsoft Gag Orders case, and will use those cases as exemplars of what governments should not be doing, and draw some lessons about the future of governance in this area. Speaker Biography Neal Katyal is the Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown Law School. He served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States during the first term of the Obama Administration and is one of the most prolific U.S. Supreme Court advocates of our time. Among his cases are Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which he prevailed in a challenge against the policy of military trials at Guantanamo Bay; Northwest Austin v. Holder, a defense of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the successful challenge against the state of Utah's ban on gay marriage; and a landmark case before the Federal Circuit concerning the patentability of the human genome. Reflecting Neal's interest in technology, he serves as a Board Partner at Social Capital, a Silicon Valley firm that focuses on technology and philanthropy.

Colin Melvin - 24 October 2016 - Who actually controls public companies and in whose interest are they run? Colin Melvin, the Global Head of Stewardship for Hermes Investment Management (the largest shareholder engagement company in the world) will discuss the role of institutional investors — pension funds, university endowments (such as the Cambridge University Endowment Fund), foundations, charities, and others — in influencing company behaviour regarding the environment, human rights, and other issues of societal concern. The particular focus of his talk will be the transportation sector, which accounts for 26% of global CO2 emissions and 60% of global oil demand. Colin’s keynote speech will cap off a workshop hosted by the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Global Shapers Cambridge Hub, Positive+Investment, and Positive Investment Cambridge.

CSER is pleased to welcome Dr David Denkenberger for this talk and seminar Abstract A large asteroid or comet impact, super volcanic eruption, or full-scale nuclear war could cause a ~100% global agricultural shortfall. Together these have a probability ~10% this century. We have proposed solutions that could feed everyone without the sun, such as growing mushrooms on dead trees. Abrupt climate change, coincident extreme weather, a volcanic eruption like that which caused the year without a summer in 1816, regional nuclear war, complete loss of bees, and medium-sized comet/asteroid could cause a ~10% global agricultural shortfall. Together these have a probability ~80% this century. We have proposed solutions that would mitigate the food price rise, such as relocating animals to the farm fields so they can consume agricultural residues. A number of risks could cause widespread electrical failure, including a series of high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMPs) caused by nuclear weapons, an extreme solar storm, and a coordinated cyber attack. Since modern industry depends on electricity, it is likely there would be a collapse of the functioning of industry and machines in these scenarios. We have proposed solutions for food (e.g. burning wood from landfills for fertilizer) and nonfood (such as retrofitting ships to be wind powered) requirements of everyone. These alternate food solutions require only low-cost preparation research and planning (unlike storing food), and therefore are cost-effective ways of saving expected lives and reducing the chance of loss of civilization, from which humanity may not recover. Speaker Biography: Dr. David Denkenberger received his B.S. from Penn State in Engineering Science, his M.S.E. from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Building Systems Program. His dissertation was on his patent-pending expanded microchannel heat exchanger. He is an assistant professor at Tennessee State University in architectural engineering. He is also an associate at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. He received the National Merit Scholarship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and is a Penn State distinguished alumnus. He has authored or co-authored over 50 publications, including the book Feeding Everyone no Matter What: Managing Food Security after Global Catastrophe. He has given over 80 technical presentations.

Professor Hilary Greaves is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Somerville College, University of Oxford. Her current research focuses on various issues in ethics while her particular interests include foundational issues in consequentialism ('global' and 'two-level' forms of consequentialism), the debate between consequentialists and contractualists, aggregation (utilitarianism, prioritarianism and egalitarianism), moral psychology and selective debunking arguments, population ethics, the interface between ethics and economics, the analogies between ethics and epistemology, and formal epistemology. Professor Greaves currently directs the project "Population Ethics: Theory and Practice", based at the Future of Humanity Institute, and funded by The Leverhulme Trust.