The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
Safeguarding our passage through the 21st Century
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk is an interdisciplinary research centre focused on the study of risks threatening human extinction that may emerge from technological advances. CSER aims to combine key insights from the best minds across disciplines to tackle the greatest challenge of the coming century: safely harnessing our rapidly-developing technological power.
An existential risk is one that threatens the existence of our entire species. The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) — a joint initiative between philosopher Huw Price, cosmologist Martin Rees, and software entrepreneur Jaan Tallinn — was founded on the conviction that these risks require a great deal more scientific investigation than they presently receive. The Centre’s aim is to develop a new science of existential risk, and to develop protocols for the investigation and mitigation of technology-driven existential risks.
CSER is hosted within the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), under the management of Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh. The Centre's Management Committee is supported by an international Advisory Board. See the CSER project website for more information. http://cser.org/
Image courtesy of Rosa Menkman from Flickr Creative Commons
This public lecture is organised by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Abstract
Big data bring great opportunities for both understanding the complex world we live in and making our lives better—but they are also ripe for misuse. In many areas of science increasingly powerful technologies allow researchers to generate a whole lot of data, which are then disseminated via digital databases. Having heaps of data available online sounds great, but it raises real problems. How are we to explore and make sense of this enormous quantity of data? Philosophers have had a lot to say about how we can make robust inferences by triangulating between multiple lines of evidence, and how we handle data in order to yield meaningful and reliable knowledge. I will draw on this literature to examine the conditions under which big data should be aggregated and interpreted. I then discuss the ways in which big data misuse could significantly damage the credibility and trustworthiness of scientific research as a whole.
About the speaker
Sabina Leonelli is a professor in philosophy and history of science at the University of Exeter, UK, where she co-directs the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences and leads the “Data Studies” research strand. Her research focuses on the philosophy of data-intensive science, especially the methods and assumptions involved in the production, dissemination and use of data in biology and biomedicine; the ways in which the open science movement is redefining what counts as research and knowledge across different research environments; and the epistemic status of experimental organisms as models and data sources, particularly in plant science. Her work involves collaborations with natural and social scientists, and historians of science; involvement in science policy initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud and Open Science Policy Platform; and multiple sources of funding including a European Research Council award (2014-2019). She has widely published in the philosophy of science as well as biology and STS, and her monograph Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study appeared in 2016 with Chicago University Press.
Agriculture is the foundation of civilization. Food security from agriculture enabled the growth of cities; cities led to nations, and nations discovered the science and technology that allowed our numbers to grow. But agriculture comes with costs including deforestation, environmental destruction, and emerging diseases. Meeting the growing world population’s demand for food, especially meat, while ensuring global health and sustainability in an era of climate change is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. One Health is the concept that human, animal, and environmental health are linked. This concept can serve as a framework to analyze the interrelationships between food security, the environment, and emerging diseases. Approximately 75 percent of newly emerging diseases come from animals, called 'zoonoses.' Mosquito-borne zoonoses, such as West Nile virus and Zika virus, exemplify the importance of implementing a One Health approach to interdisciplinary threats. One Health is being embraced worldwide.
Speaker: Laura H. Kahn, MD, MPH, MPP
Research Scholar, Program on Science and Global Security, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University Co-Founder, One Health Initiative Columnist, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
This public lecture hosted by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).
There’s been much talk about AI disrupting the job market and enabling new weapons, but very few scientists talk seriously about the elephant in the room: what will happen once machines outsmart us at all tasks?
That’s the topic of this exiting public lecture and why Prof Tegmark wrote his book “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”. This talk (and his book) is an effort to help you join the most important conversation of our time. We look forward to seeing you and to hearing your thoughts in the Q&A session following the lecture.
About the speaker
Max Erik Tegmark is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute. He is currently investigating the existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence.
Nukes of Hazard: Mapping the Relative Risks Emerging Technologies Pose to Nuclear Weapons Systems
Despite President Trump’s claims that his first order was “to renovate and modernize” the US nuclear arsenal, efforts at nuclear modernization began in 2014 under former President Barack Obama. The plan is expected to cost upwards of $1 trillion dollars over the life cycle of the new systems, with $400 billion of that spent through 2024. The modernization efforts are required if the US nuclear triad—ground based missiles, bombers and submarines—are to be a credible deterrent. However, there is more to upgrading from 8-inch floppy disks and 9-track tape. The information communications structures, which run from the Pentagon to each launch platform at home and abroad, require modernizing. Yet the risks of overhauling the entire nuclear arsenal is not merely about new warheads or missiles but reaches into the very structure of command and control. This talk will focus on two types of emerging technologies that pose significant risks to ageing nuclear weapons arsenals and command, control and communications (C3) architectures: those related to automation and artificial intelligence (AI) and their application to surveillance and warning and decision aides.
About the Speaker
Dr Heather M. Roff is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, a Research Scientist at the Global Security Initiative at the Arizona State University, a Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, and lastly a Fellow at the New America, Washington DC, Cybersecurity Initiative, Future of War Project.
DESCRIPTION In this public lecture, Professor Jonathan B. Wiener, formulates a distinct type of problem: ‘the tragedy of the uncommons’, involving the misperception and mismanagement of rare catastrophic risks. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a classic type of problem, involving multiple actors who face individual incentives to deplete shared resources and thereby impose harms on others. Such tragedies can be overcome if societies learn through experience to mobilize collective action. Although the problem of rare and global catastrophic risk has been much discussed, its sources and solutions need to be better understood. Descriptively, one identifies psychological heuristics and political forces that underlie neglect of rare catastrophic ‘uncommons’ risks, notably the unavailability heuristic, mass numbing, and underdeterrence. Normatively, one can argue that, for rare catastrophic risks, it is the inability to learn from experience, rather than uncertainty, that offers the best case for anticipatory precaution. Professor Wiener suggests a twist on conventional debates: in contrast to salient experienced risks spurring greater public concern than expert concern, rare uncommons risks exhibit greater expert concern than public concern. Further, optimal precaution against uncommons risks requires careful analysis to avoid misplaced priorities and potentially catastrophic risk–risk trade-offs. Professor Wiener offers new perspectives on expert vs public perceptions of risk; impact assessment and policy analysis; and precaution, policy learning and foresight. The Q&A session will be chaired by Dr Julius Weitzdorfer. About the Speaker Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, at Duke University. Before coming to Duke, he worked on U.S. and international environmental policy at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and at the US Department of Justice, serving in both the first Bush and Clinton administrations
Responsibility and Inequality in a Risky World w/Prof Heather Douglas
DESCRIPTION
We live in a world full of emerging risk. We generate new capacities with the potential to reorder our world and we discover new risks from old practices. What responsibilities come with doing this work? How should we manage the attendant risks? I will describe the nature and boundaries of responsibility for the new in a risky world, and I will argue that the responsibility to think through the risks that come with our knowledge production can never be fully removed from the experts doing that work, even if such responsibility can (and in many cases should) be shared. Further, the responsibility to work to avoid existential risks should make the fight for social justice and against inequality central to decisions about how to pursue projects. I will describe why tackling inequality is required, particularly as technological capacities increase.
About the speaker
Prof Douglas, University of Waterloo, is a philosopher of science who focuses on the proper understanding of science given its important role in public policy. She has a particular interests in the role of values in scientific reasoning, the epistemic constraints which could help us weigh complex sets of evidence, the history of philosophy of science in the 20th century, and how to theorise science as a process embedded in society. (Read more here: http://uwaterloo.academia.edu/HeatherDouglas)
Deep Learning: Artificial Intelligence Meets Human Intelligence
DESCRIPTION
Deep learning is based on technical advances made by the neural network revolution in the 1980’s. Why did it take so long for neural networks to recognise speech and objects in images at human levels? What were the breakthroughs that made deep learning possible? Which industries will deep learning disrupt and how will deep learning change your life? These are some of the issues that this public lecture will explore.
About the speaker
Prof Terrence Sejnowski received his PhD in physics from Princeton University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and the Harvard Medical School. He served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and was a Wiersma Visiting Professor of Neurobiology and a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech. He is now an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and holds the Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
He is also a Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he is co-director of the Institute for Neural Computation and co-director of the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. He is a pioneer in computational neuroscience and his goal is to understand the principles that link brain to behaviour. His laboratory uses both experimental and modelling techniques to study the biophysical properties of synapses and neurons and the population dynamics of large networks of neurons. New computational models and new analytical tools have been developed to understand how the brain represents the world and how new representations are formed through learning algorithms for changing the synaptic strengths of connections between neurons.
He has published over 500 scientific papers and 12 books, including The Computational Brain, with Patricia Churchland. Dr Sejnowski is the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Foundation, which organises an annual conference attended by over 6000 researchers in machine learning and neural computation and is the founding editor-in-chief of Neural Computation published by the MIT Press. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, one of only ten current scientists elected to all three national academies.
It is often remarked that the significant drivers of climate change include not only high and rising levels of fossil fuel use per person, but also high and rising human population size. The logic behind this remark appears at first sight to be simple: climate change is driven by emissions, and total emissions are equal to per-capita emissions multiplied by population, so of course (one might think) higher population will lead to more climate change.
Professor Hilary Greaves will argue that given a proper understanding of the physics of climate change, this simple argument is flawed. High population may indeed be damaging for reasons related to climate change, but if so, the reasons for this are more subtle; she will outline what they might be.
Professor Greaves' current research focusses on various issues in ethics and include: Foundational issues in consequentialism, issues of aggregation, population ethics, effective altruism, the interface between ethics and economics, the analogies between ethics and epistemology, and formal epistemology.
Science gives us a collective awareness that turns unknown unknowns into probabilities and helps us deal with risks and avoid catastrophic scenarios. It is worth distinguishing three levels of collective awareness, that involve understanding the external environment, our effect on the environment, and our collective effect on ourselves. This lecture will focus on the hardest of these — our collective effect on ourselves — and on economics in particular. The economy underpins almost everything we do, and economic fluctuations cost the world many tens of trillions of dollars, yet the budget for polar research is greater than that for economics. Why is there no large-scale effort to better understand the economy?
Professor J. Doyne Farmer (Oxford Martin School) will argue that our lack of making a serious effort and our lack of progress is due to fundamental problems with the current culture of economics, and macroeconomics in particular. He will present an alternative vision of the economics of the future, with a much stronger emphasis on our ability to simulate the world. This will give us a better day-to-day understanding of the economy, but most importantly, it will allow us to better use science to think about the big problems in our future, such as climate change, the digital economy, and the overarching changes to human existence that the bio, info, nano and cognitive technologies of the future will bring.
Professor Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His current research is in economics, including agent-based modelling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to the United Bank of Switzerland in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology.
Abstract
Professor Katyal, one of the top US Supreme Court advocates as well as the Paul Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University, will contrast European and American approaches to data privacy, digital security, and transparency, with an eye on recent groundbreaking cases in the United States. He has represented most of the top technology companies in the Apple Iphone San Bernadino decryption case, as well as in the Microsoft Gag Orders case, and will use those cases as exemplars of what governments should not be doing, and draw some lessons about the future of governance in this area.
Speaker Biography
Neal Katyal is the Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown Law School. He served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States during the first term of the Obama Administration and is one of the most prolific U.S. Supreme Court advocates of our time. Among his cases are Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which he prevailed in a challenge against the policy of military trials at Guantanamo Bay; Northwest Austin v. Holder, a defense of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the successful challenge against the state of Utah's ban on gay marriage; and a landmark case before the Federal Circuit concerning the patentability of the human genome. Reflecting Neal's interest in technology, he serves as a Board Partner at Social Capital, a Silicon Valley firm that focuses on technology and philanthropy.
Colin Melvin - 24 October 2016 - Who actually controls public companies and in whose interest are they run?
Colin Melvin, the Global Head of Stewardship for Hermes Investment Management (the largest shareholder engagement company in the world) will discuss the role of institutional investors — pension funds, university endowments (such as the Cambridge University Endowment Fund), foundations, charities, and others — in influencing company behaviour regarding the environment, human rights, and other issues of societal concern. The particular focus of his talk will be the transportation sector, which accounts for 26% of global CO2 emissions and 60% of global oil demand. Colin’s keynote speech will cap off a workshop hosted by the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Global Shapers Cambridge Hub, Positive+Investment, and Positive Investment Cambridge.
CSER is pleased to welcome Dr David Denkenberger for this talk and seminar
Abstract
A large asteroid or comet impact, super volcanic eruption, or full-scale nuclear war could cause a ~100% global agricultural shortfall. Together these have a probability ~10% this century. We have proposed solutions that could feed everyone without the sun, such as growing mushrooms on dead trees. Abrupt climate change, coincident extreme weather, a volcanic eruption like that which caused the year without a summer in 1816, regional nuclear war, complete loss of bees, and medium-sized comet/asteroid could cause a ~10% global agricultural shortfall. Together these have a probability ~80% this century.
We have proposed solutions that would mitigate the food price rise, such as relocating animals to the farm fields so they can consume agricultural residues. A number of risks could cause widespread electrical failure, including a series of high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMPs) caused by nuclear weapons, an extreme solar storm, and a coordinated cyber attack. Since modern industry depends on electricity, it is likely there would be a collapse of the functioning of industry and machines in these scenarios. We have proposed solutions for food (e.g. burning wood from landfills for fertilizer) and nonfood (such as retrofitting ships to be wind powered) requirements of everyone. These alternate food solutions require only low-cost preparation research and planning (unlike storing food), and therefore are cost-effective ways of saving expected lives and reducing the chance of loss of civilization, from which humanity may not recover.
Speaker Biography:
Dr. David Denkenberger received his B.S. from Penn State in Engineering Science, his M.S.E. from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Building Systems Program. His dissertation was on his patent-pending expanded microchannel heat exchanger. He is an assistant professor at Tennessee State University in architectural engineering. He is also an associate at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. He received the National Merit Scholarship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and is a Penn State distinguished alumnus. He has authored or co-authored over 50 publications, including the book Feeding Everyone no Matter What: Managing Food Security after Global Catastrophe. He has given over 80 technical presentations.
Professor Hilary Greaves is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Somerville College, University of Oxford. Her current research focuses on various issues in ethics while her particular interests include foundational issues in consequentialism ('global' and 'two-level' forms of consequentialism), the debate between consequentialists and contractualists, aggregation (utilitarianism, prioritarianism and egalitarianism), moral psychology and selective debunking arguments, population ethics, the interface between ethics and economics, the analogies between ethics and epistemology, and formal epistemology.
Professor Greaves currently directs the project "Population Ethics: Theory and Practice", based at the Future of Humanity Institute, and funded by The Leverhulme Trust.
Professor Charles Kennel is going to highlight the importance of acknowledging that climate change is not only measurable and noticeable by looking at global temperature, but that assessing a set of planetary vital signs plays a crucial role as well. By relying too much on one indicator, we risk that we over focus on it.
Are there possibilities to use the tools at hand - such as observations from space and ground networks; demographic, economic and societal measures; big data statistical techniques; and numerical models - to inform politicians, managers, and the public of the evolving risks of climate change at global, regional, and local scales?
About the speaker:
Charles F. Kennel is Distinguished Professor, Vice-Chancellor, and Director emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California. He was educated in astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard and Princeton. He served as UCLA's Executive Vice Chancellor, its chief academic officer, from 1996 to 1998. From 1994 to 1996, Kennel was Associate Administrator at NASA and Director of Mission to Planet Earth, a global Earth science satellite program. Kennel's experiences at NASA influenced him to go into Earth and climate science, and he became the ninth Director and Dean of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Vice Chancellor of Marine Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, serving from 1998 to 2006.
Lucid is an AI company with an Ethics Advisory Panel which is led by Kay Firth-Butterfield. She will talk about the Panel’s composition and mandate and why the company thinks it is important. Also, she will discuss how the Panel ties to the aims of the Future of Intelligence/CESR and a very brief overview of how Lucid’s AI differs from machine learning.
Bio: Kay Firth-Butterfield has worked as a Barrister, Mediator, Arbitrator, Professor and Judge in the United Kingdom. She is a humanitarian with a strong sense of social justice. She has advanced degrees in Law and International Relations which focused on ramifications of pervasive artificial intelligence. After moving to the US she taught at University level before becoming the Chief Officer of the Lucid Ethics Advisory Panel which she envisioned with the CEO and is in the process of creating. Additionally she teaches a course at the University of Texas Law School on Law and Policy regarding AI and other emerging technologies.
Pushing the Limits - A public lecture with Professor Jane Heal
Abstract
What do theory of evolution, intellectual history and philosophy tell us about what we human beings are like? And what resources - intellectual, emotional, moral - we can muster for dealing with the existential risks of our current situation? The talk will offer a speculative overview of these topics, which set the scene for the challenging issues CSER faces.
Professor Jane Heal a world leading expert in the Philosophy of Mind. Professor Heal studied for her first degree in Cambridge, reading History for two years and then Philosophy (or "Moral Sciences" as it was called in those days) for another two years. She also took her Ph.D. at Cambridge, working on problems on the philosophy of language. After two years post doctoral study in the US (at Princeton and Berkeley) she was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Having taught there for several years she moved back to Cambridge where she is now a Fellow of St John's College. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1997.
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk is delighted to host Professor Margaret Boden (Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex) for a public lecture on Friday 19th June 2015.
Abstract
Human-level (“general”) AI is more difficult to achieve than most people think. One key obstacle is relevance, a conceptual version of the frame problem. Another is lack of the semantic web. Yet another is the difficulty of computer vision. So artificial general intelligence (AGI) isn’t on the horizon. Possibly, it may never be achieved. No AGI means no Singularity.
Even so, there’s already plenty to worry about—and future AI advances will add more. Areas of concern include unemployment, computer companions, and autonomous robots (some, military). Worries about the (illusory) Singularity have had the good effect of waking up the AI community (and others) to these dangers. At last, they are being taken seriously.
Professor Margaret Boden is a world-leading academic in the study of intelligence, both artificial and otherwise. She is is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the Department of informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, cognitive and computer science. She was the founding-Dean of Sussex University’s School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, a pioneering centre for research into intelligence and the mechanisms underlying it — in humans, other animals, or machines. The School’s teaching and research involves an unusual combination of the humanities, science, and technology.
Professor Boden has also been an important participant in the recent international discussions over the long-term impacts of AI. She was a member of the AAAI’s 08/09 Presidential Panel on long-term AI futures (http://www.aaai.org/Organization/presidential-panel.php), and also took part in the recent Puerto Rico conference on the Future of AI, co-organised by CSER (http://futureoflife.org/misc/ai_conference); she is therefore uniquely well-placed to discuss near- and long-term prospects in AI.
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk is delighted to host Professor Stuart J. Russell (University of California, Berkeley) for a public lecture on Friday 15th May 2015.
The Long-Term Future of (Artificial) Intelligence
Abstract: The news media in recent months have been full of dire warnings about the risk that AI poses to the human race, coming from well-known figures such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates. Should we be concerned? If so, what can we do about it? While some in the mainstream AI community dismiss these concerns, I will argue instead that a fundamental reorientation of the field is required.
Stuart Russell is one of the leading figures in modern artificial intelligence. He is a professor of computer science and founder of the Center for Intelligent Systems at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of the textbook ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach’, widely regarded as one of the standard textbooks in the field. Russell is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Future of Life Institute and the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
We are delighted to host Dr Toby Ord (Oxford) for the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk’s next seminar, on Friday 24th April. The talk will be followed by a drinks reception.
Abstract:
How will humanity go extinct? Is it more likely to be from natural causes such as an asteroid impact or anthropogenic causes such as a nuclear war? Using the fossil record, we can place a rough upper bound on the probability of human extinction from natural causes: all natural causes put together have less than a 1% chance of causing human extinction each century, and probably less than 0.1%. In contrast, it is very difficult to put upper or lower bounds on the chance of extinction from anthropogenic causes. In this talk, Dr Toby Ord advance an argument that anthropogenic causes currently produce ten or more times as much extinction risk as the natural causes, and shows how this suggests that we should prioritise the reduction of anthropogenic extinction risks over natural ones.
About the speaker:
Toby Ord is a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University & Oxford Martin School. He works on theoretical and practical questions concerning population ethics, global priorities, existential risk and new technologies, and recently contributed a report on Managing Existential Risk from Emerging Tehnologies to the Chief Scientific Advisor’s annual report for the UK government. Dr Ord’s concern for current and future generations also led him to found the orgnanisation Giving What We Can.
Profesor Murray Shanahan (Imperial College London) will give this talk as part of a series of seminars by the Centre for the Study of Existensial Risk.
Writers who speculate about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and its attendant risks often caution against anthropomorphism, the tendency to ascribe human-like characteristics to something non human. An AI that is engineered from first principles will attain its goals in ways that would be hard to predict, and therefore hard to control, especially if it is able to modify and improve on its own design. However, this is not the only route to human-level AI. An alternative is to deliberately set out to make the AI not only human-level but also human-like. The most obvious way to do this is to base the architecture of the AI on that of the human brain. But this path has its own difficulties, many pertaining to the issue of consciousness. Do we really want to create an artefact that is not only capable of empathy, but also capable of suffering?
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk is pleased to announce a monthly seminar series beginning in January 2015.
The January seminar was given by Professor Marc Lipsitch (Harvard):
“Risks and benefits of gain-of-function experiments in potentially pandemic pathogens. How should we evaluate them, and what alternatives exist?”
Professor Derek Smith, Professor of Infectious Disease Informatics at Cambridge, gave a response.
Abstract: "A growing trend in experimental virology has been the modification of influenza viruses that are antigenically novel to, and virulent in humans, such that these variant viruses are readily transmissible in mammals, including ferrets which are thought to be the best animal model for influenza infection. Novel, contagious, virulent viruses are potential pandemic pathogens in that their accidental or malevolent release into the human population could cause a pandemic. This talk will describe the purported benefits of such studies, arguing that these are overstated; estimate the magnitude of the risk they create, argue for the superiority of alternative scientific approaches on both safety and scientific grounds, and propose an ethical framework in which such experiments should be evaluated. The talk will also explore recent developments following the pause in funding for this research announced by the United States Government in October, and steps towards the risk-benefit analysis called for by the announcement"
Professor Lipsitch is a professor of epidemiology and the Director of the Centre for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University. He is one of the founders of the Cambridge Working group, which calls for a “quantitative, objective and credible assessment of the risks, potential benefits, and opportunities for risk mitigation” of gain of function experiments in potentially pandemic pathogen strains.
For more on the scientific debate, see “Gain-of-function experiments: time for a real debate”.
In the coming century, the greatest threats to human survival may come from our own technological developments. However, if we can safely navigate the pitfalls, the benefits that technology promises are enormous. A philosopher, an astronomer, and an entrepreneur have come together to form the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The goal: to bring a fraction of humanity's talents to bear on the task of ensuring our long-term survival. In this lecture, Huw Price, Martin Rees and Jaan Tallinn will outline humanity's greatest challenge: surviving the 21st Century.
Professor Huw Price (University of Cambridge) Lord Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal) Jaan Tallinn (Co-founder of Skype)