The Era of Global Risk: An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies

by Sj Beard (Editor), Martin Rees (Editor), Catherine Richards (Editor)

This innovative and comprehensive collection of essays explores the biggest threats facing humanity in the 21st century; threats that cannot be contained or controlled and that have the potential to bring about human extinction and civilization collapse. Bringing together experts from many disciplines, it provides an accessible survey of what we know about these threats, how we can understand them better, and most importantly what can be done to manage them effectively.
These essays pair insights from decades of research and activism around global risk with the latest academic findings from the emerging field of Existential Risk Studies. Voicing the work of world leading experts and tackling a variety of vital issues, they weigh up the demands of natural systems with political pressures and technological advances to build an empowering vision of how we can safeguard humanity's long-term future.
The book covers both a comprehensive survey of how to study and manage global risks with in-depth discussion of core risk including environmental breakdown, novel technologies, global scale natural disasters, and nuclear threats. The Era of Global Risk offers a thorough analysis of the most serious dangers to humanity.
Inspiring, accessible, and essential reading for both students of global risk and those committed to its mitigation, this book poses one critical how can we make sense of this era of global risk and move beyond it to an era of global safety?

336 pages, Paperback

Published August 23, 2023

Reviews

[Juan B · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book works as a nice academic introduction to global catastrophic risk. It is a bit of a mixed bag though, with some chapters being a bit of a slog or not engaging with the topic of GCR very directly.

My favorite chapters were:
1. A brief history of existential risk and the people who worked to mitigate it
2. Theories and models: understanding and predicting societal collapse
9. From Turing's speculations to an academic discipline: a history of AI existential safety

[Jan Bloxham · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a very strong start including the preface and introduction, too many of the chapters suffer horribly from academic writing: dry, unengaging, and needlessly wordy. They read a bit like research papers written to impress supervisors.

Nevertheless, there is good, well-researched content to be found here.

My favourite chapters were 1, 2 and 7.