Building a Resilient Civilization: An Introduction
Posted by Jeriaska on December 17th, 2008
Mike Treder of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and J. Hughes of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies introduce the November 14 conference on Global Catastrophic Risks taking place in Mountain View, California. The event followed a meeting on the same subject, an immensely diverse collection of events could constitute global catastrophes, in July at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. The topic for the conference was “Building a Resilient Civilization.”
The following transcript of Mike Treder and J. Hughes’ GCR08 introduction has not been approved by the speakers. Video and audio are also available.
Building a Resilient Civilization: An Introduction
J. Hughes: I’m J. Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
Mike Treder: I’m Mike Treder, the executive director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. We sponsored this event together, along with the Lifeboat Foundation.
J. Hughes: A word about IEET, the organization was founded in 2004 by myself and Nick Bostrom. Nick was the one who turned me on to the exciting and sometimes depressing topic of considering global catastrophic and existential risks. We have it as one of the IEET’s programmatic foci. We have not done as much with the topic as we would like—we have focused on human rights, human enhancement and some other things over the years.
This is our first catastrophic or existential risks meeting that we have sponsored, and it follows on the publication by Nick and Milan Cirkovic, who is also an IEET fellow, of the edited Global Catastrophic Risks volume that we were promoting in conjunction with this event. It also follows on their having had a conference in July at Oxford to kick off the book. It was a three-day Catastropalooza of every single possible way we could whack ourselves as a species.
We were trying to put a somewhat more positive spin on the events for today, and so we are not only going to have Anders not only frame the morning discussion in terms of what we mean by “catastrophic risks,” but then we are going to be turning to Jamais Cascio, who is an IEET fellow, and has many other hats, and he will be talking about the concept of resilience, which we want to have as a kind of lens through which to look at how we can become as a civilization more resilient to the kinds of disasters that we might face.
Mike Treder: I was just having a conversation with Jamais before we stood up for the welcome and introduction about the difference between catastrophic risk and existential risk. I hope that that will be one of the topics that people will address in their presentations here. How big are the risks that we are talking about? Do they represent catastrophies—that is, severly damaging events on a large scale? Or do they represent existential risks, which could mean the end of civilization as we know it and possibly the entire human species?
The focus of the conference is primarily on catastrophic risks this century, as we very likely cannot predict beyond that, and, as J. suggests, also resilience. How can we make use of emerging technologies, emerging social structures, new ways of interacting to build resilience, whether it is getting off earth or creating new networks that will help us to deal with what we can look forward to as the greatest catastrophic risks of this century.
Jamais Cascio: Do we have a tag for this, for flickr or twitter? Could I suggest “GCR08,” if you post pictures to flickr or comments to twitter or similar services?
J. Hughes: Advice from the wired edge. The designated tag for the event is “GCR08.”
