Resources
COLLEGE 107
COLLEGE 107, Preventing Human Extinction, is a course designed for Stanford frosh who are interested in exploring global catastrophic and existential risks. SERI’s faculty leaders, Paul N. Edwards and Steve Luby, have taught the course annually since 2019. Students in COLLEGE 107 engage with plausible scenarios by which global catastrophes could occur – as well as with existing and potential solutions. They also discuss the psychological, social and epistemological barriers that inhibit society from recognizing, evaluating, and acting on these threats.
STS Major: Catastrophic Risks and Solutions
The interdisciplinary undergraduate major in Science, Technology & Society now offers a special concentration in Catastrophic Risks and Solutions. The concentration allows students to focus on understanding, communicating, and reducing large-scale catastrophic risks, defined as threats to large cities, regions, ethnic groups, entire societies, human civilization, or humanity itself. Examples include climate change, pandemics, ecosystem collapse, famine, nuclear war, genocide, earthquakes, asteroid impacts, and uncontrolled or hostile artificial intelligence.
Students choose one or several such risks and define a plan of study that includes analysis, tools for understanding, and current knowledge of how they might be solved or reduced in scale and scope. Examples of analysis and tools for understanding include scientific approaches (statistics, modeling, risk analysis), social science approaches (psychology, anthropology, or sociology of risk), and humanistic studies (history, philosophy, fiction, film, art).
Organizations and Opportunities
Organizations and opportunities for GCRs mitigations
Academia
The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University (FHI)
The Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research
Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at UC Berkeley (CHAI)
Global Priorities Institute (GPI)
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University (CSER)
The Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins
Non-Profits
The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI)
The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI)
The Future of Life Institute (FLI)
Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
The Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI)
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
The Global Challenges Foundation
The Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR)
Industry
Philanthropic Foundations