Global Catastrophic Risks (Hardcover)

~ Nick Bostrom (Editor), (Editor)
Key Phrases: universal compliance, emerging infectious diseases, molecular machinery, New York, United States, Artificial Intelligence (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

The book works well, providing a mine of peer-reviewed information on the great risks that threaten our own and future generations. Nature We should welcome this fascinating and provocative book. Martin J Rees (from foreword) [Provides] a mine of peer-reviewed information on the great risks that threaten our own and future generations. Nature

Product Description

A global catastrophic risk is one with the potential to wreak death and destruction on a global scale. In human history, wars and plagues have done so on more than one occasion, and misguided ideologies and totalitarian regimes have darkened an entire era or a region. Advances in technology are adding dangers of a new kind. It could happen again.
In Global Catastrophic Risks, 26 leading experts look at the gravest risks facing humanity in the 21st century, including natural catastrophes, nuclear war, terrorism, global warming, biological weapons, totalitarianism, advanced nanotechnology, general artificial intelligence, and social collapse. The book also addresses over-arching issues--policy responses and methods for predicting and managing catastrophes.
This is invaluable reading for anyone interested in the big issues of our time; for students focusing on science, society, technology, and public policy; and for academics, policy-makers, and professionals working in these acutely important fields.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 550 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198570503
• ISBN-13: 978-0198570509
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #412,070 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important, September 25, 2008

By	Peter McCluskey (Mountain View, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a relatively comprehensive collection of thoughtful essays about the risks of a major catastrophe (mainly those that would kill a billion or more people).
Probably the most important chapter is the one on risks associated with AI, since few people attempting to create an AI seem to understand the possibilities it describes. It makes some implausible claims about the speed with which an AI could take over the world, but the argument they are used to support only requires that a first-mover advantage be important, and that is only weakly dependent on assumptions about that speed with which AI will improve.
The risks of a large fraction of humanity being killed by a super-volcano is apparently higher than the risk from asteroids, but volcanoes have more of a limit on their maximum size, so they appear to pose less risk of human extinction.
The risks of asteroids and comets can't be handled as well as I thought by early detection, because some dark comets can't be detected with current technology until it's way too late. It seems we ought to start thinking about better detection systems, which would probably require large improvements in the cost-effectiveness of space-based telescopes or other sensors.
Many of the volcano and asteroid deaths would be due to crop failures from cold weather. Since mid-ocean temperatures are more stable that land temperatures, ocean based aquaculture would help mitigate this risk.
The climate change chapter seems much more objective and credible than what I've previously read on the subject, but is technical enough that it won't be widely read, and it won't satisfy anyone who is looking for arguments to justify their favorite policy. The best part is a list of possible instabilities which appear unlikely but which aren't understood well enough to evaluate with any confidence.
The chapter on plagues mentions one surprising risk - better sanitation made polio more dangerous by altering the age at which it infected people. If I'd written the chapter, I'd have mentioned Ewald's analysis of how human behavior influences the evolution of strains which are more or less virulent.
There's good news about nuclear proliferation which has been under-reported - a fair number of countries have abandoned nuclear weapons programs, and a few have given up nuclear weapons. So if there's any trend, it's toward fewer countries trying to build them, and a stable number of countries possessing them. The bad news is we don't know whether nanotechnology will change that by drastically reducing the effort needed to build them.
The chapter on totalitarianism discusses some uncomfortable tradeoffs between the benefits of some sort of world government and the harm that such government might cause. One interesting claim:
totalitarian regimes are less likely to foresee disasters, but are in some ways better-equipped to deal with disasters that they take seriously.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Catalyst for Ideas and Actions, August 23, 2008

By	R. B. Cathcart (Glendale, California United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Individual and government policy instigators everywhere, starting with voting citizens, must face the common problem of bringing expert knowledge to bear on globalized public policy-making. This book is rather like a "think tank" in and of itself and could serve such a purpose successfully! Campaigning in 1912, the intellectual and soon-to-be-US President Woodrow Wilson commented that "What I fear is a government of experts". Yet, in the 21st Century, the world-public has to have the best possible advice on macro-problems that can, may or certainly will impact human society. The Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil, in GLOBAL CATASTROPHES AND TRENDS: THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS (2008) has also foreseen, along with the stellar topic-centered name writers in this excellent revelatory text,the necessity of focused individuals, investigative panels and advisory bodies helping the world-public. None express a desire or need to "rule the world", the stealing of choices from the world-public, or the foreclosure of world-public options for future life-styles! However, they do a masterful job of explicating the macro-problems developing, impending or forecastable. The well-edited prose, informative diagrams and necessary illustrations are simply awe-inspiring! This demonstrative text--by no means to be considered a textbook--is fascinating, alarming, inspiring and just plain delicious reading. I reccommend it as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10!!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eclectic and thought-provoking academic essays, November 6, 2008

By	David J. Aldous "gentleman scholar" (Alameda, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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21 chapters by different authors succeed in the declared goal of giving a big picture of the subject (GCR) as seen by academics in different disciplines. The content is appropriately non-technical -- like the serious end of the ``popular science" genre -- though the writing styles are more reminiscent of an academic paper or lecture than the style of best-selling popular science books. The opening 8 ``background" chapters (on very diverse topics from long-term astrophysics to public policy toward catastrophe) were the least satisfying to me, many (while interesting in themselves) seeming to be each author's favorite lecture recycled with a nod to GCR. Of these chapters, let me just single out Eliezer Yudkowsky's chapter on cognitive biases in an individual's risk assessments, as one of the best 20-page summaries of that topic I have read.

Amongst the core chapters discussing particular risks, the three that are most ``hard science", on supervolcanos, asteroid or comet impact, and extra-solar-system risks are just great -- one learns for instance that (contrary to much science fiction) comets are more a risk than asteroids, and the major risk in the last category is not nearby supernovas but cosmic rays created by gamma ray bursts. These three chapters are perhaps the only contexts where it's reasonable to attempt to estimate actual probabilities of the catastrophes.

The balanced article on global warming is unlikely to please extremists, concluding that mainstream science predicts a linear increase in temperature that may be unpleasant but not catastrophic, while the various speculative non-linear possibilities leading to catastrophe have plausibilities impossible to assess. The article on pandemics is surprisingly upbeat (``are influenza pandemics likely? Possibly, except for the preposterous mortality rate that has been proposed"), as is the article on exotic physics ("Might our vacuum be only metastable? If so, we can envisage a terminal catastrophe, when the field configuration of empty space changes, and with it the effective laws of physics ..."). The articles on nuclear war, on nuclear terrorism, and on risks from biotechnology and from nanotechnology are perfectly sensible and well-argued. These articles are somewhat technical, so it is a curious relief to arrive at "totalitarian government" which discusses in an easy to read way why 20th century totalitarian governments did not last forever, and circumstances under which a stable worldwide totalitarian government might emerge.

The article on AIs emphasizes that we wrongly imagine intelligent machines as like humans -- "how likely is it that AI will cross the vast gap from amoeba to village idiot, and then stop at the level of human genius?" -- and that we should attempt to envisage something quite different. But the subsequent discussion of Friendly or Unfriendly AIs rests on the assumptions that AIs may be created which have intelligence and motivation ("optimization targets", in the author's effort to avoid anthropomorphizing) to do things on their own initiative, and that their motivations will be comprehensible to humans. Well, I find it hard enough to imagine what "motivation/optimization targets" mean to an amoeba or a village idiot, let alone an AI.

The only article I found positively unsatisfactory was on social collapse. A catastrophe eliminating global food production for one year would likely cause "collapse of civilization" in fighting over the 2 months food supply in storage. But not elimination for just one month. A serious discussion of the sizes of different catastrophes needed to reach this tipping point would be fascinating, but the article merely assumes power law distributions for the size of an unspecified disaster -- this is the sort of thing that brings mathematical modeling into disrepute.

Overall, a valuable and eclectic selection of thought-provoking articles.