Overview

The Global Risk and Resilience programme from the University of Cambridge will provide 

rovide a rigorous understanding of the emerging transdisciplinary field of Existential Risk Studies

Train students in critically engaging with a wide range of interdisciplinary research on risk drivers, multipliers, and mitigation challenges, including the core skills required to interpret and apply scientific research into unprecedented and extreme future risk.

Provide the opportunity to put these to work in both a focused individual study of specific global challenges and a group futures thinking systematic exercise.

Give students an understanding of the variety of mitigation opportunities and challenges, focusing on the reality of policymaking in relevant areas (which may include but are not limited to AI, biosecurity, climate change, and nuclear policy) and the different impact strategies or theories of change that can influence these.

Familiarize students with, and cultivate an appreciation for, standards of rigorous and responsible research in this area, highlighting both the need for high quality research and the pitfalls of irresponsible practices.

Enable students to recognize opportunities for applying insights from this research to related disciplines (which may include but are not limited to Science and Technology Studies, Disaster Studies, Philosophy, Economics, International Relations, and Computer Science) and to various risk or technology focused careers across sectors such as government, industry, academia, and civil society.

Key facts:

Knowledge and Understanding

• An in-depth survey of the emerging transdisciplinary field of Existential Risk Studies, including key concepts, ethical and epistemological challenges, methods, approaches, and tools, and impact and outreach strategies.

• Critical engagement with the historical and sociological development of the field, and of broader awareness about existential and global catastrophic risk, the factors influencing this, and the difficulties in producing rigorous and responsible research in this area.

• A systematic interdisciplinary understanding of risk drivers, risk multipliers, and risk mitigation challenges that contribute to the current level of existential and global catastrophic risk (AI, biosecurity, environmental change, global-scale natural catastrophes, and nuclear security).

• A critical awareness of the range of proposals for risk mitigation and the governance of science, technology, and other anthropogenic risk drivers, their feasibility, potential benefits and drawbacks, and relationship to existing policies, institutions, and movements.