The second of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk’s international conferences provided a timely opportunity for the Centre, along with the wide communities working on existential and global catastrophic risks and in related fields, to reflect on our work so far and to deepen and broaden our learning from other disciplines. This allowed us to both focus on some of the practical challenges of the task that we’ve set ourselves and identify what we are doing well. Hence, the Conference served not only to address important issues facing the existential risk research community, but also to establish and maintain the connections with other communities that have important contributions to make to the developing ‘science’ of existential risk research.
The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk 2018 contributed to the activities of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk’s Managing Extreme Technological Risks research project, made possible through the support of a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Supplementary funding for workshop activities was received from the Hauser-Raspe Foundation. The opinions expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation or of the Hauser-Raspe Foundation.
We are grateful to all of the speakers and participants who took part in this conference, each of whom brought their own perspectives on the challenges we face, both as a research community and a global civilization. This report was written by Simon Beard and Catherine Rhodes with additional contributions by Luke Kemp. Lalitha Sundaram, Lauren Holt, Shahar Avin, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh and Julius Weitzdörfer.
