Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk 2016

October 14, 2016

The past five years have seen rapid growth in what Jaan Tallinn calls the “xrisk ecosystem” – a thriving community of researchers and others, inside and outside academia, united by a common interest in potential serious hazards of powerful and beneficial new technologies. This conference aims to bring this community together, to ask ourselves where our efforts should best be directed, over the rest of the decade and beyond.

Each of the three days of the conference will focus on one of these areas:

  • Machine Intelligence: Creating A Community for Beneficial AI
  • Depreciation of Earth Systems: Biodiversity, Climate and Environmental Risks
  • Bioengineering: Lessons from Recent Cases for Building Engagement between Communities.

Within each focus area we will aim to explore these three themes:

  • Current best understanding of risks and mitigation strategies
  • Lessons from the history of engagement with these risks, in academia, industry and the policy world
  • Future directions for the ecosystem engaging with the risks.

There will also be several keynotes tying together lessons learned and steps forward from across the range of extreme technological risks.

The conference is organized by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) and supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation as part of the ‘Managing Extreme Technological Risk’ research programme.

Registration will be available from mid-October.

Any queries about the Conference should be sent to [email protected]

—Event Producer