Does anyone know the parts of government that deal with existential risk? My impression (from UK/US) is that it is spread about in the military and intelligence agencies and universities.
This might be an okay way of doing things, but perhaps there is a better way of doing things? I’m thinking about central parts of government encouraging making legible models of farming and industry that can feed into decision making around existential risks and centres of excellence on coordination systems to provide best practice methods to avoid arms races. Do such things exist?
I think the general answer for non-military threats is going to be “the Civil Service”, in branches that deal with the respective area (health, climate impact, food supply chain, tech policy, space assets) with academics and businesspeople and policy wonks consulted for expertise, and the government getting their own Special Advisers on the case when they’re planning policy. Generally they’re going to be interested in threats to people in the UK and the UK economy in general rather than purely existential threats. I’m not sure what sort of models of farming and industry you’re envisaging, but the Office for National Statistics and various budget and health and weather forecasting related bodies do loads of modelling work of varying quality. I’m just not sure much of it relates to x-risk.
I suppose I’m interested in questions around what is an existential threat. How bad a nuclear winter would it have to be to cause the collapse of society (and how easily could society be rebuilt afterwards). Both require robust models of agriculture in extreme situations and models of energy flows in economies where strategic elements might have been destroyed (to know how easy rebuilding would be). Since pandemic/climate change also have societal collapse as a threat the models needed would apply to them too (they might trigger nuclear exchange or at least loss of control over nuclear reactors, depending upon what societal collapse looks like).
The national risk register is the closest I found, in the public domain. It doesn’t include things like large meteorites, that I found.