Centre for the Study of Existential Risk Newsletter June 2020

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The Economist front page

CSER’s research—and catastrophic and existential risks more broadly—were featured in a front page story in the Economist. Haydn Belfield and Rumtin Sepasspour were interviewed for the story.

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AI in a crisis needs ethics with urgency

AI can help the COVID-19 response, but rapidly scaling up uses of AI carries its own risks. The urgency of a crisis doesn’t mean we can neglect ethics, but must find ways to do ethics with urgency—as CSER researchers argue in a new Nature Machine Intelligence article.

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Response to EU White Paper on AI

The submission mainly focuses on mandatory conformity assessments for high-risk AI applications carried out by independent testing centres. Our researchers’ key recommendation is to keep this proposed framework and not water it down.

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Video: The Existential Risk of Climate Change

Dr Luke Kemp spoke on a Oxford Climate Society panel with David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth; Zeke Hausfather, Director of Climate and Energy at the Breakthrough Institute; and Kate Guy, Senior Research Fellow with the Center for Climate and Security.

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Lord Martin Rees public appearances

Lord Rees spoke on Being a Scientist at the Cheltenham Science Festival (video, see also this article) and was interviewed on Sky News on After The Pandemic: How will life and society change?

11 Global Catastrophic Risk Papers

Each month, The Existential Risk Research Assessment (TERRA) uses a unique machine-learning model to predict papers most relevant to existential risk or global catastrophic risk.

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Updates from our partners

Interdisciplinary pre-print on COVID-19

Led by FHI researchers, it finds schools might play surprisingly large role in transmission and several nonpharmaceutical interventions are effective at reducing transmission while putting low burden on population

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FLI Podcast

Steven Pinker and Stuart Russell on the Foundations, Benefits, and Possible Existential Threat of AI

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