Global Catastrophic Risks Kindle Edition

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.

GCR (Global Catastrophic Risks) is a real page-turner. I literally couldn't put it down. Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night with the book open on my chest, and the lights on, and I'd begin reading again from where I'd dozed off hours earlier, and I'd keep reading till I just had to go to sleep.

I had read a review of GCR in the scientific journal "Nature" in which the reviewer complained that the authors had given the global warming issue short shrift. I considered this a plus.

If, like me, you get very annoyed by "typos," be forewarned. There are enough typos in GCR to start a collection. At first I was a bit annoyed by them, but some were quite amusing... almost as if they were done on purpose.

Most of the typos were straight typing errors, or errors of fact. For example, on page 292 the author says that the 1918 flu pandemic killed "only 23%" of those infected. Only 23%? That seems a rather high percentage to be preceeded by the qualifier "only". Of course, although 50 million people died in the pandemic, this represented "only" 2% to 3% of those infected... not 23%. On p 295 we read "the rats and their s in ships" and it might take us a moment to determine that it should have read, "the rats and their fleas in ships."

But many of the typos were either fun, or a bit more tricky to figure out: on p. 254 we find "canal so" which you can probably predict should have been "can also." Much trickier, on p. 255 we find, "A large meteoric impact was invoked (...) in order to explain their idium anomaly." Their idium anomaly?? Nah. Better would have been..."the iridium anomaly!" (That's one of my favorites.) Elsewhere, we find twice on the same page "an arrow" instead of "a narrow"... and so it goes..."mortality greater than $1 million." on p. 168 (why the $ sign?) etc. etc.

But the overall impact of the book is tremendous. We learn all sorts of arcane and troubling data, e.g. form p.301 "A totally unforseen complication of the successful restoration of immunologic function by the treatment of AIDS with antiviral drugs has been the activation of dormant leprosy..." I can hear the phone call now...."Darling, I have some wonderful news, and some terrible news...hold on a second dearest, my nose just fell off..."

So even if you're usually turned off by typos, don't let that stop you from buying this book. I expected more from the Oxford University Press, but I guess they've sacked the proofreader and they're using Spell-Check these days. But then, how did "their idium anomaly" get past Spell-Check? I guess Spell-Check at Oxford includes Latin.

A really good book. It's not light reading, though. Scientific literacy is highly desirable and maybe necessary for almost all chapters. Numeracy is desirable for some chapters, but I don't recall anything beyond algebra. The chapters on "Long-term astrophysical processes" and "Evolution and the future of humanity" are not really germane to the book's theme; all the same, they are well done and fascinating. I cannot say that of "The totalitarian threat;" perhaps I was too much put off by the author's right wing perspective. The other 19 chapters are all both germane and solid. I thought the chapter on "Artificial intelligence as a positive and negative factor in global risk" was outstanding. However, I am no expert on AI, so my opinion isn't worth much.