Does anyone have a good list of books related to existential and global catastrophic risk? This doesn’t have to just include books on X-risk / GCRs in general, but can also include books on individual catastrophic events, such as nuclear war.
Here is my current resource landscape (these are books that I have personally looked at and can vouch for; the entries came to my mind as I wrote them—I do not have a list of GCR / X-risk books at the moment; I have not read some of them in full):
Especially Chapter 8: ‘The Environment: Where Does Prudence Lie?’, which contains some remarkable precursors to metaphors and arguments in The Precipice etc.
Does anyone have a good list of books related to existential and global catastrophic risk? This doesn’t have to just include books on X-risk / GCRs in general, but can also include books on individual catastrophic events, such as nuclear war.
Here is my current resource landscape (these are books that I have personally looked at and can vouch for; the entries came to my mind as I wrote them—I do not have a list of GCR / X-risk books at the moment; I have not read some of them in full):
General:
Global Catastrophic Risks (2008)
X-Risk (2020)
Anticipation, Sustainability, Futures, and Human Extinction (2021)
The Precipice (2019)
AI Safety
Superintelligence (2014)
The Alignment Problem (2020)
Human Compatible (2019)
Nuclear risk
On Assessing the Risk of Nuclear War (2021)
General / space
Dark Skies (2020)
Biosecurity
Biosecurity and bioterrorism (2016)
Global Catastrophic Biological Risks (2019)
In no particular order. I’ll add to this if I think of extra books.
Precursors to thinking about existential risks and GCRs
Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters, Vol. 1 (2011)
The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (1996)
The Fate of the Earth (1982)
Nuclear risk
The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986)
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017)
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (2013)
A longer list is available here
Biosecurity
Biosecurity Dilemmas: Dreaded Diseases, Ethical Responses, and the Health of Nations (2017)
Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World—Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It (2000)
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy (2009)[1]
AI safety
Smart Than Us (2014)
The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World (2019)
Recovery
Feeding Everyone No Matter What: Managing Food Security After Global Catastrophe (2014)
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch (2014)
Space / big-picture thinking
Pale Blue Dot (1994), Cosmos (1980), and Billions and Billions[2] (1997)
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (2004)
Fiction
The Three-Body Problem (2006)
The Andromeda Strain (1969)
The Ministry for the Future (2020)
Cat’s Cradle (1963)
This covers both nuclear security and biosecurity topics.
Especially Chapter 8: ‘The Environment: Where Does Prudence Lie?’, which contains some remarkable precursors to metaphors and arguments in The Precipice etc.
Others, most of which I haven’t fully read and not always fully on topic:
Richard Posner. Catastrophe: Risk and Response. (Precursor)
Richard A Clarke and RP Eddy. Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes
General Leslie Groves. Now It Ca Be Told: the Story of the Manhattan Project (nukes)
The Bible (Noah’s Ark).
File under “Fiction” or “Precursors”.
Small remark: The Goodreads list on nuclear risk you linked to is private