Global catastrophic risks (GCR) are risks of events that could significantly harm or even destroy human civilization at the global scale. GCR is related to the concept of existential risk, which is risk of events that would cause humanity to no longer exist. (Note that Nick Bostrom, who coined the term existential risk, defines it in a slightly different way.) Prominent GCRs include climate change, nuclear warfare, pandemics, and artificial general intelligence. Due to the breadth of the GCRs themselves and the issues that GCRs raise, the study of GCR is quite interdisciplinary.
According to a range of ethical views, including my views, reducing GCR should be our top priority as individuals and as a society. In short, if a global catastrophe occurs, then not much else matters, since so much of what we might care about (such as human wellbeing, the wellbeing of non-human animals, or the flourishing of ecosystems) would be largely or entirely wiped out by the catastrophe. The details about prioritizing GCR are a bit more complicated than this (and are part of ongoing research), but GCR does nonetheless remain a (or the) top priority from a range of views.
Given the interdisciplinary nature of GCR, my own work on GCR is largely oriented towards pulling together the various and sometimes disconnected strands of the field. Much of this is done in collaboration with the Society for Risk Analysis, including a series of sessions at the 2010 and 2011 SRA Annual Meetings.
* SRA 2010 Global Catastrophic Risk Sessions Abstracts (pdf)
* SRA 2011 Global Catastrophic Risk Sessions Abstracts (pdf)
Other organizations active in GCR include Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute and the non-profits Lifeboat Foundation and Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. See in particular the FHI website global-catastrophic-risks.com.
I have also recently completed a GCR bibliography, consisting of academic and popular literature on GCR. This bibliography serves to help inform GCR researchers about GCR work being done in other disciplines and to illustrate the extent of existing GCR research.
* GCR bibliography (.doc format)
* GCR bibliography (.pdf format)
Finally, several of my academic publications discuss GCR: "Climate change: Evidence of human causes and arguments for emissions reduction", "Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis", "How long until human-level AI? Results from an expert assessment", "Is humanity doomed? Insights from astrobiology", "Universalist ethics in extraterrestrial encounter", "Cost-benefit analysis of space exploration: Some ethical considerations", "The 'Sustainability Solution' to the Fermi Paradox", "Global Catastrophic Risks" (book review, pdf), "Better to exist: A reply to Benatar" (pdf), and "Beyond the Ramsey model for climate change assessments".
Created 20 Jul 2010 * Updated 20 Jul 2011