Interrelatedness of x-risks and systemic fragilities
Keywords: polycrisis, meta-crisis, systems thinking, complexity, global systems change
I’m hoping to generate a discussion to see if there might be interest in the EA community to explore the interconnections between various existential risks, and cascading global systems collapse.
I’m a part of a network of people (both EAs and beyond) that are deepening our understanding of how various risks relate to each other, and what our role may be in creating resiliency across systems. Though I don’t think this conversation has really entered mainstream EA discourse, I thought I’d share a 10 page ‘call for an international research program on the risk of a global polycrisis’ published by the Cascade Institute. Click here to download the pdf.
The abstract:
Humanity faces an array of grave, long-term challenges, now often labeled “global systemic risks.” While scientific knowledge of the individual risks spawning these crises is deep, our understanding of causal links among risks remains shallow. This observation raises two key questions: What causal processes might be accelerating and amplifying risks within global natural and social systems and synchronizing risks (and their concomitant crises) across these systems? And what might humanity do to mitigate or even reverse these processes? We offer a novel analytical framework to aid identification of hitherto unrecognized, complex teleconnections and self-reinforcing feedbacks among global systems. We argue that the ultimate result of such unrecognized processes could be a global polycrisis—a single, macro-crisis of interconnected, runaway failures of Earth’s vital natural and social systems that irreversibly degrades humanity’s prospects. We therefore call for a global scientific collaboration to discern causal mechanisms that might generate a polycrisis and actionable policies to mitigate this risk.
My thoughts:
EA has experience thinking about X-risks
Systems thinkers & complexity researchers have tools for modelling systems dynamics
There are several overlapping networks with highly skilled facilitators, capable of bridging across differences (in expertise, ontologies, paradigms, theories of change...)
I wonder what might happen if we hosted a 10-20 person retreat for [thinkers from EA] and [systems researchers] to collaboratively map what we know about the interconnectedness of various existential and systemic risks. I haven’t been able to find many open-source systems maps describing these dynamics, and this has somewhat hindered my ability to compare mental models across different groups. The assumed dynamics are often more implicit within groups, and shared maps (partial though they’ll be) may facilitate important understandings of things we may presently be missing.
Actually, in all transparency, we’ve been hosting these kinds of retreats for a while, so I consider this post to be more of a ‘is anyone else interested?’ invitation. I’d also be curious to hear other reactions from EAs who may have creative ideas sparked from reading the PDF!
I think this comment on another post about the polycrisis is pretty good and captures why I’m skeptical of the polycrisis as a concept. But I’m very suspicious of people downvoting a post that is not actually a substantive claim about the polycrisis, but rather an invitation to a collaboration (which can’t possibly be negative, and could definitely be positive).
I’ve observed that some folks (in EA or other disciplines) have skepticism for the idea of a polycrisis, while others view it as obviously correct, and others (like myself) are see it as plausible and worth exploring further. I suspect part of the differences in reaction have something to do with how we make sense of nebulosity (like Jackson’s comment suggests).
Part of what may make polycrisis framing so challenging to grapple with is that it is so big, so multifaceted, that individual attempts to ‘hold the whole concept in our heads’ is often not helpful. I’m quite interested in how we may collectively become more capable of working with this kind of incredibly complex challenge. And how might we coordinate on challenges that we can each individually only grasp a part of?
Karthik, I’d love to hear if you have more to share about your thinking on this thread overall. Cheers!
My view is that “polycrisis” is a useful term because from a neartermist view, we should dedicate some EA resources to mitigating the low probability scenario where interconnected disasters happen at once, and the best approaches to mitigating polycrises could differ from the best approaches to mitigating individual disasters.
One example could be: climate change, naturally arising pandemics, drought, famine, wars, recessions
I’m not a longtermist but from a longtermist view, I’d think that again, some EA resources should be dedicated to the extinction risk posed by simultaneous, smaller, interconnected risks.
I would like to hear why this was downvoted.
Me too.
Hi, my day job is in Urban Resilience Consulting (so less on technical and academic side) and I’d love to potentially hear about retreats and work in this area.
You should also be aware of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering’s work in this area via their Safer Complex Systems program. They’d probably welcome some collaboration.
Hey Naryan,
thanks for your efforts. I am interested in similar topics also from the perspective of sustainability transitions research, which also seems to be well positioned to help address the “metacrisis” but not really paying that much attention right now. Feel free to reach out via PM, if you are interested to connect.
Cheers!