Mapping the end — to avoid it

It seems every day there’s a new existential threat lurking around the proverbial corner: a superhuman, intelligent AI takeover? Or maybe a nuclear winter wrapping around the Earth? While it may all sound Kafkaesque, experts around the world are taking these risks very seriously.

Across the pond, researchers are studying everything from bioweapons to the dangers of climate change, looking for ways to slow them down — or hopefully stop them in their tracks.

In the final part of David Brancaccio’s series on the study of existential threats, he spoke with Sonja Amadae, director of the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and a tenured political scientist at the University of Helsinki. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: I appreciate some of the challenges that the Center studies: nuclear climate, bio weapons, bio mistakes, unbridled artificial intelligence. I mean, we have the means to destroy civilization, if not the human race. Now, how do you frame the work that you do at the Center?

Sonja Amadae: We've always had that idea that we analyze existential risks. Those are the ones that would threaten all of human civilization, where there might not be even a start over for the human species, as well as global catastrophic risk, which means, well, maybe something like 90% of people would be killed in some kind of a mass event. But what we really are trying to add to that now is to mitigate existential risk, so that we're action-oriented, and not only publishing nice research papers; we're looking for ways to mitigate.

Brancaccio: Yeah, I was struck by a statement in some of the Center's materials that among the things you try to do is convene unexpected alliances to mitigate catastrophe. What is that about?

Amadae: So, one unexpected alliance is looking at how we can do work to better understand the actual risks of nuclear energy versus the ongoing use of fossil fuels and carbon-intensive fuels, especially now that energy sovereignty and energy security are really topical. So, that means collaborating here at Cambridge with the center that's for nuclear energy, or that nuclear engineering group, so to speak. And then just to continue on that, we're in arts and humanities, but many of our researchers cross into social science and even the natural sciences.

Brancaccio: I mean, you mentioned you want to keep it focused on solutions, options, approaches, so that we don't retreat into our caves in despair. I mean, that's the key here, right? Reminding people that this is not inevitable. If we try to bear down on some of these issues?

Amadae: It does sometimes seem as though global outcomes are inevitable from an individual perspective, because it's very hard for any of us to have that leverage to make that kind of a change we might like to make. In a way, I think it's simple that if we could bring the world back to the idea of ‘right before might,’ then at least we're building the basics for the kind of relationships that can, in a fractal pattern, from the micro to the macro, can try to regrow the type of civil society that can concretely and squarely address these existential risks we're now facing.