Global Catastrophic Risks

Edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic
Foreword by Martin J. Rees

576 pages | tables and figures | 234x156mm

978-0-19-857050-9 | Hardback | 03 July 2008

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Edited by Nick Bostrom, Department of Philosophy, Oxford University, and Milan M. Cirkovic, Astronomical Observatory, Belgrade

Foreword by Martin J. Rees

Contributors:
AUTHORS' BIOGRAPHIES

Gary Ackerman is Research Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. Mr. Ackerman concurrently also holds the post of Director of the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, a private research and analysis institute. Prior to taking up his current positions, Mr. Ackerman was Director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism Research Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, and he earlier served as the Chief of Operations of the South Africa-based African-Asian Society. He received his M.A. in International Relations (Strategic Studies - Terrorism) from Yale University and his Bachelors (Law, Mathematics, International Relations) and Honors (International Relations) degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Originally hailing from South Africa, Mr. Ackerman possesses an eclectic academic background, including past studies in the fields of mathematics, history, law, and international relations, and has won numerous academic awards. His research encompasses various areas relating to terrorism and counterterrorism, including terrorist threat assessment, terrorist technologies and motivations, terrorism involving chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons, terrorist financing, environmental extremism, and the modeling and simulation of terrorist behavior.

Fred Adams was born in Redwood City, received his undergraduate training in Mathematics and Physics from Iowa State University in 1983 and his PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988. For his PhD dissertation research, he received the Robert J. Trumpler Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he joined the faculty in the Physics Department at the University of Michigan in 1991. Adams is the recipient of the Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society and the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award. He has also been awarded both the Excellence in Education Award and the Excellence in Research Award from the College of Literature, Arts, and Sciences (at Michigan). In 2002, he was given The Faculty Recognition Award from the University of Michigan. Professor Adams works in the general area of theoretical astrophysics with a focus on star formation and cosmology. He is internationally recognized for his work on the radiative signature of the star formation process, the dynamics of circumstellar disks, and the physics of molecular clouds. His recent work in star formation includes the development of a theory for the initial mass function for forming stars and studies of extra-solar planetary systems. In cosmology, he has studied many aspects of the inflationary universe, cosmological phase transitions, magnetic monopoles, cosmic rays, anti-matter, and the nature of cosmic background radiation fields. His work in cosmology includes a treatise on the long term fate and evolution of the universe and its constituent astrophysical objects.

Myles R. Allen is joint head of the Climate Dynamics Group, Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford. His research focuses on the attribution of causes of recent climate change, particularly changing risks of extreme weather, and assessing what these changes mean for the future. He has worked at the Energy Unit of the United Nations Environment Programme, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a Lead Author on detection of change and attribution of causes for the 2001 Assessment, and as a Review Editor on global climate projections for the 2007 Assessment. He is Principal Investigator of the climateprediction.net project, also known as the BBC Climate Change Experiment, using public resource distributed computing for climate change modelling. He is married, to Professor Irene Tracey, with three children.

Nick Bostrom is Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He previously taught in the Faculty of Philosophy and in the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He has a background in physics and computational neuroscience as well as philosophy. Dr. Bostrom's research covers the foundations of probability theory, scientific methodology, risk analysis, and he is one of the world's leading experts on ethical issues related to human enhancement and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. He has published some 100 papers and articles, including papers in Nature, Mind, Journal of Philosophy, Bioethics, Journal of Medical Ethics, Astrophysics & Space Science, one monograph, Anthropic Bias (Routledge, New York, 2002), and two edited volumes with Oxford University Press. One of his papers, written in 2001, introduced the concept of an existential risk. His writings have been translated into more than 14 languages. Bostrom has worked briefly as an expert consultant for the European Commission in Brussels and for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington DC. He is also frequently consulted as a commentator by the media. Preprints of many of his papers can be found on his website, <http://www.nickbostrom.com>.

Bryan Caplan received his Ph.D. in economics in 1997 from Princeton University, and is now an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Most of his work questions the prevailing academic assumption of voter rationality; contrary to many economists and political scientists, mistaken voter beliefs do not harmlessly balance each other out. Caplan's research has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Law and Economics, Social Science Quarterly, and numerous other outlets. He has recently completed The Logic of Collective Belief, a book on voter irrationality. Caplan is a regular blogger at Econlog, <http://www.econlog.econlib.org>; his website is <http://www.bcaplan.com>.

Christopher F. Chyba is professor of astrophysical sciences and international affairs at Princeton University, where he also directs the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Previously, he was co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He was a member of the White House staff from 1993 to 1995, entering as a White House Fellow, serving on the National Security Council staff and then in the Office of Science and Technology Policy's National Security Division. He is a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. His degrees are in physics, mathematics, history and philosophy of science, and astronomy and space sciences. His work addresses international security (with a focus on nuclear and biological weapons proliferation and policy), as well as solar system physics and astrobiology. He has published in Science, Nature, Icarus, Foreign Affairs, Survival, International Security, and elsewhere. In October 2001 he was named a MacArthur Fellow for his work in both planetary sciences and international security. With Ambassador George Bunn, he is co-editor of the recent volume U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy: Confronting Today's Threats.

Joseph Cirincione is a Senior Fellow and Director for Nuclear Policy at the Center for American Progress and the author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (Columbia University Press, Spring 2007). Prior to joining the Center in May 2006, he served as director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for eight years. He teaches a graduate seminar at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, has written over 200 articles on defense issues, produced two DVDs on proliferation, appears frequently in the media, and has given over one hundred lectures around the world in the past two years. Mr. Cirincione worked for nine years in the U.S. House of Representatives on the professional staff of the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Government Operations, and served as staff director of the Military Reform Caucus. He is the co-author of Contain and Engage: A New Strategy for Resolving the Iranian Nuclear Crisis (March 2007), two editions of Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats (2005 and 2002), Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security (March 2005) and WMD in Iraq, (January 2004). He was featured in the 2006 award-winning documentary Why We Fight. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Milan M. Cirkovic is a research associate of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, (Serbia) and a Professor of Cosmology at the Department of Physics, University of Novi Sad (Serbia). He received his Ph. D. in Physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (USA), M.S. in Earth and Space Sciences from the same university, and his B.S. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Belgrade. His primary research interests are in the fields of astrophysical cosmology (baryonic dark matter, star formation, future of the universe), astrobiology (anthropic principles, SETI studies, catastrophic episodes in the history of life), as well as philosophy of science (risk analysis, foundational issues in quantum mechanics and cosmology). A unifying theme in these fields is the nature of physical time, the relationship of time and complexity, and various aspects of entropy-increasing processes taking place throughout the universe. He wrote one monograph (QSO Absorption Spectroscopy and Baryonic Dark Matter; Belgrade, 2005) and translated several books, including titles by Richard P. Feynman and Roger Penrose. In recent years, his research has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Physics Letters A, Astrobiology, New Astronomy, Foundations of Physics, Philosophical Quarterly and other major journals.

Arnon Dar is a Professor of Physics at the department of physics and the Asher Space Research Institute of the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa and is the incumbent of the Naite and Beatrice Sherman Chair in physics. He received his Ph.D. in 1964 from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot for inventing the Diffraction model of Direct nuclear reactions. After its generalization to high energy particle reactions, he worked on the quark model of elementary particles at the Weizmann Institute and MIT. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, he applied the quark model to the interaction of high energy elementary particles, nuclei and cosmic rays with atomic nuclei, while working at the Technion, MIT, the University of Paris at Orsay, and Imperial College, London. In the late 1970's, he became interested in neutrino physics and neutrino astronomy. Since the early 1980's his main research interest has been particle astrophysics and cosmology, particularly astrophysical and cosmological tests of the standard particle-physics model, the standard Big Bang model, and general relativity. These included studies of cosmic puzzles such as the solar neutrino puzzle, the origin of cosmic rays and gamma ray bursts, dark matter and dark energy. The research was done at the Technion, the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK, and the European research center CERN in Geneva. In collaboration with various authors, he suggested the existence of cosmic backgrounds of energetic neutrinos from stellar evolution, supernova explosions, and cosmic ray interactions in external galaxies, the Day-Night Effect in solar neutrinos, tests of neutrino oscillations with atmospheric neutrinos, gravitational lensing tests of general relativity at very large distances and the supernova - gamma ray burst - cosmic rays - mass extinction connection. His most recent work has been on a unified theory of cosmic accelerators, gamma ray bursts and cosmic rays. He published more than 150 scientific papers in these various fields in professional journals and gave more than 100 invited talks, published in the proceedings of international conferences. He won several scientific awards and served the Technion, Israel Defense Ministry, Israel Atomic Energy Committee and numerous national and international scientific committees and advisory boards.

David Frame holds a PhD in physics and a Bachelors degree in philosophy and physics from the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand. He spent two years working in the Policy Coordination and Development section of the New Zealand Treasury as an economic and social policy analyst, followed by a stint in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading, working on the PREDICATE project. In 2002 he moved to the Climate Dynamics group in the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, sub-department of Physics at the University of Oxford, where he managed the climateprediction.net experiment.

Yacov Y. Haimes is the Lawrence R. Quarles Professor of Systems and Information Engineering, and Founding Director (1987) of the Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems at the University of Virginia. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. (with Distinction) degrees in Systems Engineering from UCLA. On the faculty of Case Western Reserve University for 17 years (1970-1987), he served as Chair of the Systems Engineering Department. As AAAS-AGU Congressional Science Fellow (1977-78), Dr. Haimes served in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President, and on the Science and Technology Committee, US House of Representatives. He is a Fellow of seven societies, including the IEEE, INCOSE, and the Society for Risk Analysis, (where he is a past President). The Second Edition of his most recent book, Risk Modeling, Assessment, and Management, was published by Wiley & Sons in 2004 (the first edition was published in 1998). Professor Haimes is the recipient of the 2001 Norbert Weiner Award, the highest award presented by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, the 2000 Distinguished Achievement Award, the highest award presented by the Society for Risk Analysis, the 1997 Warren A. Hall Medal, the highest award presented by Universities Council on Water Resources, the 1995 Georg Cantor Award, presented by the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, and the 1994 Outstanding Contribution Award presented by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, among others. He is the Engineering Area Editor of Risk Analysis: An International Journal, member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and Associate Editor of Reliability Engineering and Systems Safety. He has served on and chaired numerous national boards and committees, and a consultant to public and private organizations. He has authored (and co-authored) six books and over 250 editorials and technical publications, edited 20 volumes, and has served as dissertation/thesis advisor to over 30 Ph.D. and 70 M.S. students. Under Dr. Haimes' direction, the Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems has focused most of its research during the last decade on risks to infrastructures and safety-critical systems.

Robin Hanson is an Assistant Professor of Economics, and received his Ph.D in 1997 in social sciences from Caltech. He joined George Mason's economics faculty in 1999 after completing a two year post-doc at U.C Berkely. His major fields of interest include health policy, regulation, and formal political theory. He is known as an expert on idea futures markets and was involved in the creation of the Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He is also known for inventing Market Scoring Rules like LMSR (Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule) used by prediction markets such as Inkling Markets and Washington Stock Exchange, and has conducted research on signaling.

James Hughes is a bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut where he teaches health policy. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics and health policy at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Dr. Hughes serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and its affiliated World Transhumanist Association. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Westview Press, 2004) and produces a syndicated weekly program, Changesurfer Radio. In the 1980s, while working in Sri Lanka, Dr. Hughes was briefly ordained as a Buddhist monk, and he is working on a second book Cyborg Buddha: Spirituality and the Neurosciences. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. Dr. Hughes lives in rural eastern Connecticut with his wife, the artist Monica Bock, and their two children.

Edwin Dennis Kilbourne has spent his professional lifetime in the study of infectious diseases, with particular reference to virus infections. His early studies of coxsackieviruses and herpes simplex preceded intensive study of influenza in all of its manifestations. His primary contributions have been to the understanding of influenza virus structure and genetics and the practical application of these studies to the development of influenza vaccines and to the understanding of the molecular epidemiology and pathogenesis of influenza. His studies of influenza virus genetics resulted in the first genetically engineered vaccine of any kind for the prevention of human disease. The approach was not patented and recombinant viruses from his laboratory have been used by all influenza vaccine manufacturers since 1971. A novel strategy for infection permissive influenza immunization has received 2 United States Patents. Following his graduation from Cornell University Medical College in 1944, and an internship and residency in medicine at the New York Hospital, he served two years in the Army of the United States. After three years at the former Rockefeller Institute, he served successively as Associate Professor of Medicine at Tulane University, as Professor of Public Health at Cornell University Medical College, and as founding Chairman of the Department of Microbiology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine at which he was awarded the rank of Distinguished Service Professor. His most recent academic positions were as Research, then Emeritus Professor at New York Medical College. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians, the National Academy of Sciences and was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1994. He is the recipient of the Borden Award of the Association of American Medical Colleges for Outstanding Research in Medical Sciences, and an honorary degree from Rockefeller University in addition to other honors and lectureships. As an avocation, Kilbourne has published light verse and essays and articles for the general public on various aspects of biological science - some recently collected in a book on Strategies of Sex.

Bill Napier is an astronomer whose research interests are mostly to do with the interaction of comets and asteroids with the Earth. He co-authored the first paper (Napier & Clube 1979) to point out that the impact rates then being found were high enough to be relevant on timescales from the evolutionary to the historical, and has co-authored three books on the subject and written about a hundred papers. His career covers 25 years at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, two at Oxford and nine at Armagh Observatory, from which he retired in March 2005. He now writes novels with a scientific background (Nemesis was referred to in a House of Lords debate on the impact hazard). This allows him to pursue a peripatetic research career, working with colleagues in La Jolla, Armagh and Cardiff. He is an honorary professor at Cardiff University.

Ali Nouri is a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton's Program on Science and Global Security where he works on issues related to biological security. His interests include designing non-proliferation schemes to curb the potential misuse of biotechnology. Prior to joining the program, Nouri was engaged with biotechnology-related activities at the United Nations office of the secretary-general. Nouri holds a PhD in molecular biology from Princeton University, where he studied the role of various tumor suppressor genes during animal development. Prior to Princeton, he was a research assistant at the Oregon Health Sciences University and studied the molecular basis of retroviral entry into cells. He holds a BA, in biology, from Reed College.

Chris Phoenix, director of research at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN), has studied nanotechnology for more than 15 years. He obtained his BS in Symbolic Systems and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1991. From
1991 to 1997, Phoenix worked as an embedded software engineer at Electronics for Imaging. In 1997, he left the software field to concentrate on dyslexia correction and research. Since 2000, he has focused exclusively on studying and writing about molecular manufacturing. Phoenix, a published author in nanotechnology and nanomedical research, serves on the scientific advisory board for Nanorex, Inc., and maintains close contacts with many leading researchers in the field. He lives in Miami, Florida.

Richard A. Posner is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is the author of numerous books and articles, mainly dealing with the application of economics to law and public policy. His recent books include the sixth edition of Economic Analysis of Law (Aspen Publishers, 2003); Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (Hoover Institution and Rowman; Littlefield, 2005). He is a former president of the American Law and Economics Association, a former editor of the American Law and Economics Review, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He is the recipient of a number of honorary degrees and prizes, including the Thomas C. Schelling Award for scholarly contributions that have had an impact on public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

William Potter is Institute Professor and Director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS). He is the author or editor of fourteen books, the most recent of which is The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism (2005). Dr. Potter has been a member of numerous committees of the National Academy of Sciences and currently serves on the Nonproliferation Panel of the Academy's Committee on International Security and Arms Control. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and served for five years on the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters and the Board of Trustees of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. He currently serves on the International Advisory Board of the Center for Policy Studies in Russia (Moscow). He was an advisor to the delegation of Kyrgyzstan to the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference and to the 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003 and 2004 sessions of the NPT Preparatory Committee, as well as to the 2000 and 2005 NPT Review Conferences.

Michael R. Rampino is an associate professor of Biology working with the Environmental Studies Program at New York University (New York City, USA), and a research associate at the NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. He has visiting appointments at the Universities of Florence and Urbino (Italy), the University of Vienna (Austria) and Yamaguchi University (Japan). He received his Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Columbia University (New York City, USA), and completed a post-doctoral appointment at the Goddard Institute. His research interests are in the fields of the geological influences on climatic change (such as explosive volcanism), astrobiology (evolution of the Universe, planetary science, catastrophic episodes in the history of life), as well as the history and philosophy of science. He has edited or co-edited several books on climate (Climate: History, Periodicity and Predictability; Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987); catastrophic events in Earth history (Large Ecosystem Perturbations; The Geological Society of America, 2007; and K-T Boundary Events (Special Issue); Springer, 2007), and co-authored a text in astrobiology with astrophysicist Robert Jastrow (Stars. Planets and Life: Evolution of the Universe; Cambridge University Press, 2007). He is also Co-Editor of the Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series for Springer. His research has been published in Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), Geology and other major journals.

Martin Rees is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal and also Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University. After studying at the University of Cambridge, he held post-doctoral positions in the UK and the USA, before becoming a professor at Sussex University. In 1973, he became a fellow of King's College and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge (continuing in the latter post until 1991) and served for ten years as director of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy. From 1992 to 2003 he was a Royal Society Research Professor.

Peter Taylor is a Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, with a background in science, mathematics, insurance, and risk analysis. Following a BA in Chemistry and a D Phil in Physical Science, Peter spent 25 years in the City of London first as a management consultant then as a director of insurance broking, underwriting, and market organisations in the London insurance market. In this time, Peter was responsible for IT, analysis, and loss modeling departments and led and participated in many projects. Peter is also Deputy Chairman of the Lighthill Risk Network (www.lighthillrisknetwork.org <http://www.lighthillrisknetwork.org>), created in 2006 to link the business and science communities for their mutual benefit.

Mike Treder, executive director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN), is a professional writer, speaker, and activist with a background in technology and communications company management. In addition to his work with CRN, Treder is a consultant to the Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University, serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Lifeboat Foundation, is a Research Fellow with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and is a consultant to the Future Technologies Advisory Group. As an accomplished presenter on the societal implications of emerging technologies, he has addressed conferences and groups in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Brazil. Treder lives in New York City.

Frank Wilczek is considered one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists. He is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons). When only 21 years old and a graduate student at Princeton University, in work with David Gross he defined the properties of color gluons, which hold atomic nuclei together. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He taught at Princeton from 1974-81. During the period 1981-88, he was the Chancellor Robert Huttenback Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the first permanent member of the National Science Foundation's Institute for Theoretical Physics. In the fall of 2000, he moved from the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was the J.R. Oppenheimer Professor, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics. Since 2002, he has been an Adjunct Professor in the Centro de Estudios Científicos of Valdivia, Chile. In 2004 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, and in 2005 the King Faisal Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Trustee of the University of Chicago. He contributes regularly to Physics Today and to Nature, explaining topics at the frontiers of physics to wider scientific audiences. He received the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society for these activities.

Christopher Wills is a professor of biological sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Trained as a population geneticist and evolutionary biologist, he has published more than 150 papers in Nature, Science, the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and elsewhere, on a wide diversity of subjects. These include the artificial selection of enzymes with new catalytic capabilities, the distribution and function of microsatellite repeat DNA regions, and most recently the maintenance of diversity in tropical forest ecosystems. He has also written many popular articles for magazines such as Discover and Scientific American, and has published six popular books on subjects ranging from the past and future evolution of our species to (with Jeff Bada) the origin of life itself. In 1999 he received the Award for Public Understanding of Science from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2000 his book <"Children of Prometheus>" was a finalist for the Aventis Prize. He lives in La Jolla, California, and his hobbies include travel, SCUBA diving and photography.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a Research Fellow of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a nonprofit organization devoted to supporting full-time research on very-long-term challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence. Yudkowsky's current focus as of 2006 is developing a reflective decision theory, a foundation for describing fully recursive self-modifying agents that retain stable preferences while rewriting their source code. He is the author of the papers "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence" and "Creating Friendly AI", and assorted informal essays on human rationality.

Global Catastrophic Risks

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