In their new book Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an unknowable future, Mervyn King (Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013) and John Kay (Fellow of St John's College, Oxford and Financial Times columnist) discuss CSER.
"True 'black swans' are states of the world to which we cannot attach probabilities because we cannot conveive of these states. The dinosaurs fell victim to an unknown unknown - even as they died they did not know what had happened to them. Human extinction will more likely come about in another way. Martin Rees, a Cambridge scientist and the Astronomer Royal, has founded a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, to identify such potential threats and suggest measures to mitigate them. He warns of the possibility of runaway climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence."