On 25th August 2021, CSER presented the panel, "Who is Creating Existential Risk? (Why, and Why Should We Care?)"
Who or what are the primary creators of global risk? Should we be most concerned about individuals like the lone rogue scientist or hooded hacker, or place more responsibility with larger actors such as large corporations and states? To what extent should we think of actors as holding responsibility for risk, as opposed to it being something that emerges in a more distributed way? Why does this matter, and how might understanding the root causes and responsibilities around global risk help us to better mitigate them?
In this panel, researchers from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) discussed these questions for an array of different hazards, ranging from AI to bioweapons, climate change to nuclear weapons. They considered the sources of existential risk in the past and present, what could change in the future, and what this means for the world.
