Talking 'bout the End of the World - Assessing Major Risks, with Anders Sandberg

Today, I've been up to Birbeck to see the lecture by the affable Anders Sandberg regarding existential risks to the human race i.e. what's going to be the most likely thing to make us go the way of the dinosaurs, and how can we prevent it.

Anders works for the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and the presentation was a very wide ranging talk on risk assessment for the human race.

In particular, he showed that most of the risks in the past have been self inflicted, or intrinsic, notably disease, war and totalitarian regimes. The best way of combating the last two is good, transparent and accountable government. Easy.

He also showed that when measuring the occurrence of disasters, such as tsunamis and earthquakes, there's something he called a "Large, Long Tail". If you look at a graph of the incidences of, say, meteorite impacts, there's a large number of small ones, and a small number of large ones, but that this "tailing off" of numbers is a lot larger and longer that people suppose.

He made a comment on one of his Oxford colleagues, a quantum physicist, who believes so strongly in parallel worlds that he always buys a lottery ticket because, even if he loses in this universe, in another he's won!

Overall, it was a fine and entertaining lecture on the fifth floor again, with a lively Q&A afterwards.