Global Catastrophic Risk: Fundamentals and Applications

By Fouad Sabry

What Is Global Catastrophic Risk

A global catastrophic risk, often known as a doomsday scenario, is a potential future occurrence that poses a threat to the well-being of humans on a worldwide scale and might even put the existence of modern civilization in jeopardy or wipe it out entirely. An occurrence that has the potential to permanently and significantly reduce the potential of humanity is referred to as a "existential risk."

How You Will Benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Global catastrophic risk

Chapter 2: Nick Bostrom

Chapter 3: Superintelligence

Chapter 4: AI takeover

Chapter 5: Human extinction

Chapter 6: Differential technological development

Chapter 7: Future of Humanity Institute

Chapter 8: Existential risk from artificial general intelligence

Chapter 9: Global Catastrophic Risks (book)

Chapter 10: Global catastrophe scenarios

(II) Answering the public top questions about global catastrophic risk.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of global catastrophic risk in many fields.

(IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technologies in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of global catastrophic risk' technologies.

Who This Book Is For

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of global catastrophic risk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jul 2, 2023

Book preview

Chapter 1: Global catastrophic risk

A worldwide catastrophic risk, often known as a doomsday scenario, is a terrifying possibility for the future that threatens the health and safety of people all over the world, A number of academic and non-profit groups have been founded over the course of the past two decades to research global catastrophic and existential risks, design viable mitigation strategies, and either advocate for or implement these measures.

The phrase global catastrophic risk does not have a clear definition, but it often refers to a danger that has the potential to cause severe damage to human well-being on a worldwide scale. Even if a worldwide catastrophe were to occur at a level of severity that wiped out the majority of life on earth, both the ecosystem and humans would eventually be able to bounce back. This is because most global catastrophes would not be as severe as this (in contrast to existential risks).

In a similar manner, Richard Posner, in his book titled Catastrophe: Risk and Response, distinguishes out and categorizes occurrences that bring about total overthrow or disaster on a global scale, as opposed to local or regional scales. Posner cites such events as worthy of special attention on cost–benefit grounds because they could either directly or indirectly put the survival of the human race as a whole in jeopardy. [Citation needed].

Existential dangers are those that threaten the ruin of humanity's long-term potential, according to one definition of the phrase.

The most obvious means by which humanity's long-term potential could be lost are extinction and unrecoverable collapse and dystopia. Nevertheless, there are additional ways, such as unrecoverable dystopia and unrecoverable collapse.

Conventionally, potential global catastrophic risks are divided into two categories: those that are anthropogenic and those that are not. An asteroid impact event, a supervolcanic eruption, a natural pandemic, a lethal gamma-ray burst, a geomagnetic storm from a coronal mass ejection destroying electronic equipment, natural long-term climate change, hostile extraterrestrial life, or the predictable Sun transforming into a red giant star engulfing the Earth are all examples of non-anthropogenic risks. Another non-anthropogenic risk is the predictable Sun transforming into.

Anthropogenic hazards are those that are brought about by people and include those that are associated with technology, governance, and climate change. The development of artificial intelligence that is not congruent with human aspirations, biotechnology, and nanotechnology are all examples of potential threats posed by technology. Inadequate or malicious global governance creates risks in the social and political domains, such as global war and nuclear holocaust, bioterrorism using genetically modified organisms, cyberterrorism destroying critical infrastructure like the electrical grid, or the failure to manage a natural or engineered pandemic. These risks could be mitigated, but insufficient or malicious global governance creates these risks in the first place. Global warming, environmental degradation, extinction of species, famine as a result of non-equitable resource allocation, human overpopulation, crop failures, and non-sustainable agriculture are all examples of global catastrophic hazards that fall under the purview of earth system governance.

Research into the nature and mitigation of global catastrophic risks and existential risks faces a unique collection of obstacles, and as a result, it is not easily subjected to the typical norms of scientific rigor. This is due to the fact that such research is exposed to a unique set of challenges.

Existential disasters have never befallen humanity, thus any such event that might take place would unquestionably be a first.

There are reasons that can be attributed to economics that can explain why so little effort is being put into the reduction of existential risks. Due to the fact that it is a worldwide public good, we should anticipate that it would be undersupplied by various markets.

Cognitive biases such as scope insensitivity, hyperbolic discounting, availability heuristic, conjunction fallacy, affect heuristic, and the overconfidence effect can all play a role in how people evaluate the significance of existential risks. Other cognitive biases include the affect heuristic and the overconfidence effect.

It appears that significantly bigger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively distinct scenarios, such as the extinction of the whole human race, seem to elicit a different mode of thinking... When they hear about existential peril, some individuals who would never dream of inflicting harm on a child would remark things like, Well, maybe the human species doesn't really deserve to survive..

All previous forecasts of the end of the human race have been disproved by subsequent events. Some people will view future warnings as having less credibility as a result of this. Nick Bostrom contends that due to survivor bias and other anthropic factors, the fact that humans have not gone extinct in the past is insufficient evidence that this won't happen in the future.

The concept of defense in depth is a helpful model that divides preventative actions against potential hazards into three distinct layers of protection.:

The act of lessening the likelihood that a disastrous event would take place in the first place is referred to as prevention. For instance: preventative measures to forestall the spread of new highly dangerous diseases.

Response: Stopping a localized disaster from spreading to other parts of the world. As an illustration, below are