Global Catastrophic Risks
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is a research institution that contains specialists, technologists, and scientists from a broad range of disciplines. CSER is dedicated to the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction or civilisational collapse. The centre’s external advisors include, among others, the superentrepreneur Elon Musk, the futurist Nick Bostrom, the geneticist George Church, and (until recently) the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.
The co-founder of CSER, Martin John Rees, is a professor of cosmology and astrophysics, a member of the British House of Lords, Baron of Ludlow, and a former president of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest national scientific institution. He founded CSER in 2012, together with Huw Price (professor of philosophy at Cambridge), and Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype). I had the honour to interview Rees about existential risks and the long-term future of humanity.
How did you come to establish the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risks?
I think all of us felt that, whereas there is a huge amount of study on more conventional risks — carcinogenic food, low radiation dosage, plane crashes and so on — there is not enough study of the newly emergent risks which are of low probability but of extreme consequence. CSER is based in Cambridge, which is probably the number one scientific university in Europe. So, we feel we have an obligation to create more awareness of the extreme risks with the aim of trying to distinguish between those that are science fiction and those that are realistically emergent and to try to minimise the very serious ones. We decided that we ought to try and do what we could to deepen our understanding of threats and decide which could be dismissed as impossible and which need to be addressed more carefully, so that’s been the aim in our centre.
What characterises existential risks of the 21st century?
The main threats that now pose catastrophes to human civilisation come from events that are man-made and there are two kinds. One is the kind of threat which is caused by humans collectively, like the disastrous climate change, diversity exhaustion of natural resources, and things of that kind which we need to worry about as global challenges. Then there is the other kind of threat, which comes from the fact that humans are more empowered by new technology. It takes only a few people to start an epidemic or perhaps to produce a cyberattack. So, we are vulnerable to small groups who are empowered by very powerful technology. A local event can cascade globally even if it is triggered by only a few people — and that is something which is new.
How do you make sense of the current crisis?
I prefer to use the word ‘catastrophic’ as a good existential variable for something that is going to be a setback to civilisation either temporarily or permanently. Of course, you can also imagine something that can wipe us all out, but that’s much less likely. However, we tend to be complacent around something that has never happened. If we think of the current crisis in retrospect, we already know now that there are things that could have been done better, such as more stringent monitoring of what goes on in wet markets and generally in farms, to try and catch the virus as it emerged. There certainly has been ‘war preparation’ for potential epidemics, but in terms of the kind of equipment that is needed, it would have required much more with really big investments and really big insurance premiums. That’s just one example, and I think we must also think about and prepare for other kinds of events that we can imagine but which have not yet happened.
How can we prepare better for pandemics in the future?
The last great influenza pandemic killed between 2.5–5% of the world population in 1918, far more than World War One. As our current pandemic shows, this risk has not gone away. Though our scientific knowledge has improved, we are more densely populated, interconnected, and entangled with zoonotic reservoirs than before. We need better surveillance, better international health systems, and better development and stockpiles of vaccines and medical countermeasures. However, there is a trade-off in natural pandemics between transmissibility and lethality — if a pathogen kills its host too quickly, the host cannot infect many other people. But due to biotechnological advances, it may soon be possible to engineer pathogens to be more infectious, more fatal, and to have a delayed onset — and so be far more dangerous. To that, we just need to add either error or terror.
What does ‘error or terror’ mean from a biotechnological perspective?
A natural pandemic could kill hundreds of millions of people, but an engineered pandemic could kill many more and even threaten civilisational collapse. New breakthroughs in gene editing are increasing our capabilities, and the cost of DNA sequencing and the hurdle of expertise are rapidly decreasing. This growing biotechnological knowledge and capability will have many benefits: new and better drugs, improvements to agricultural productivity, and environmental protection. But it is a dual-use technology that can be misused in ways that cause harm. An engineered pandemic could escape from a lab, or it could be deliberately used as a weapon. During the 20th century, several countries had state-run bioweapons programmes, and we know of several non-state groups that have attempted to acquire bioweapons. Almost singlehandedly, one postdoc was recently able to recreate horsepox (a disease similar to smallpox, which killed 300 million in the 20th Century, ed.) from scratch in only six months. Capabilities that were once only in the hands of governments will soon be within reach of non-state actors. A novel pathogen, designed to be deadlier than anything in nature, could severely affect the entire world. As I like to say: The global village will have its village idiots, and they’ll have global range. It’s going to change the balance between three things that we’d like to maintain: privacy, liberty, and security.
How will the balance between these three things change in the future?
We would like to have all three, but I think we are going to have to give up a degree of privacy. The downside of one lone wolf making something dangerous is so great that we’ve got to minimise that by more intrusive surveillance. I think we are going to have to accept that governments or corporations are going to know a lot more about us, and we are going to tolerate that just as we came to tolerate CCTV cameras in public places. These invasions of privacy may be something that some nations will be happy to accept in exchange for security.
How is it that we are more vulnerable today than we have ever been before?
Pandemics are as old as humanity, but the interconnectivity of today’s world makes us more vulnerable than ever. Air travel spread transmission of the coronavirus worldwide in a few days, and when social media got a hang of it, it spread both panic and rumours at the speed of light. I think this speed makes it very hard to ensure that people have a realistic assessment of what’s going on. It’s very hard for the average person to discriminate between what is genuine advice and what is completely bogus in the current media and information environment. Another reason is that our globalised supply chains and manufacturing depend on components being shipped all over the world. So, the fact that people try very hard to make manufacturing as economical as possible, which has led to just-intime delivery and not keeping a stock of spare parts but rather spreading the supply chain thin across the world, makes us more vulnerable to breakdowns. Adding to this, our levels of expectations are now much higher. Even if the number of cases is only 1% of the population, and if they need hospital treatment, we risk overwhelming our hospitals. People will claim treatment and care which in principle should be available, but if too many people need care at once, it leads to a social breakdown. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed up to half of the population in certain towns and cities, and the other half of the population just went on in a fatalistic way. This level of suffering could never be endured today. The threshold of discomfort and disruption that would lead to complete breakdown of social order is now much lower. Of course, pandemics aren’t the only threats that can cause these kinds of social shocks. The same can happen incidentally in the quite different context of a massive cyber-attack, which in the worst of circumstances, would lead to complete anarchy within a few days.
Which changes do you foresee in the short term because of this pandemic?
I think that in the short run, this pandemic and the lockdown will continue to accentuate existing inequality. People will realise when this is over that those who have suffered most are the poor and those with the lack of security, those with insecure jobs, or who can’t work from home or have savings. If you are working on a zero hours contract, then you cannot stop working if you want to earn enough to feed your family. And if your family is living in a crammed tower block in the middle of a city, then the hardships you have to endure weigh more heavily than the potential constructive benefits that come from realising that people may not need to commute to work five days a week because more can be done at home. It may encourage the redirection of the economy towards greater emphasis on reducing inequality, which appears to be increasing in most Western countries. We need to be aware that the next catastrophe may be quite different than our current one, so we can’t be too optimistic, but I think the lessons I’ve mentioned are ones that would be a benefit if we take them to heart and learn from them. One thing I should have mentioned already is that we have been talking mostly about how the crisis affects people in your country and mine. However, it is going to be far worse in the developing world, where the number of deaths is going to be far greater in countries and regions where people are crowded together far more and there’s far less medical attention. In the case of the SARS epidemic, it luckily only spread to places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Toronto — places that could handle it. If it had spread to Mumbai for example, the number of deaths could have been vastly greater. In contrast, the coronavirus is certainly spreading everywhere and is certainly going to affect Mumbai, Lagos, and all those places where social distancing and isolation is less of an option for most people.
Will studying and planning for the future see a revival after our current pandemic?
I hope so. We ought to explore all possible scenarios, both for the near future as well as for the second half of this century, when most people who are young today will still be alive. I think it is important to have longer time horizons to our planning in general. Although we are much more aware of the vast horizons in space and time than the earlier generations, our planning horizon is shorter. We do not spend 400 years building cathedrals anymore like our ancestors did. This kind of mindset needs to return, for the sake of future generations.
