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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A primer & some reflections on recent CSER work (EAB talk), published by MMMaas on April 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: quick personal views, based on own experiences, but non-comprehensive; estimate this covers less than 50% of CSER’s work of last few years. Format: edited transcript-with-slides (in style of other overviews). I’m Matthijs Maas, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (Cambridge University). In March I gave a 25-minute Hamming Hour talk at EA Bahamas, on some of the things we’ve been up to at CSER. I especially focused on CSER’s work on long-termist AI governance, my area of expertise, but also covered some of our other x-risk research lines, as well as policy work. The talk was not recorded, but several people mentioned afterwards they found it useful and novel, so I decided to turn it into a quick Forum post. Most of the papers I link to below should be open-access, let me know if they’re not and I’m happy to share directly. This talk aims to give a quick overview on CSER’s work – what we’ve been up to recently, and how we approach the study and mitigation of existential risks. Now, I know that ‘general institutional sales pitch’ is many people’s least-favourite genre of talk. .but hear me out: by giving a primer on some of what CSER has been up to the past year or two, I will argue that CSER’s work and approach offers... substantive and decision-relevant insights into a range of existential risks, both in terms of threat models and in terms of mitigation strategies; a distinct approach and methodology to study existential risks and global catastrophic risks; and a record of working across academic disciplines and institutes to produce peer-reviewed academic work on existential risks, which can help build the credibility of the field to policymakers; a track record of policy impact at both the national (UK) and international level, which others in EA can draw from, or learn from. As such, while CSER’s academic work has occasionally been comparatively less visible in the EA community, I believe that much of CSER’s work is relevant to EA work on existential risks and long-term trajectories. That’s not to say we’ve worked this all out–there are a lot of uncertainties which I and others have, and cruxes to be worked out. They reflect some thoughts and insights that I thought would be useful to share, and I would be eager to discuss more with the community. In terms of structure: I’ll discuss CSER’s background, go over some of its research, and finally discuss our policy actions and community engagement: CSER was formally founded in 2012 by Lord Martin Rees, Jaan Tallinn and Prof Huw Price (so it recently celebrated its 10th anniversary). Our first researcher started in late 2015, and since then we’ve grown to 28 people. Most of our work can be grouped into four major clusters: AI risk (alignment, impact forecasting, and governance), biorisk, environmental collapse (climate change and ecosystem collapse), and 'meta' work on existential risks (including both the methodology of how to study existential risks, as well as the ethics of existential risks). That’s the background on CSER - now I’ll go through some recent projects under these research themes. This is non-exhaustive–I estimate I cover less than 50% of CSER’s work over the last few years--and I will focus mostly on our AI work, which is my specialty. Specifically, at CSER I’m part of the AI: Futures and Responsibility team. AI-FAR’s work is focused on long-term AI risks, impacts and governance, and covers three main research lines, (1) AI safety, security and risk, (2) futures and foresight (of impacts), and (3) AI governance: Within the AI safety track, one interesting line of work is work by John Burden and José Hernandez-Orallo, on mapping the ...