Hi all, A reminder that CSER's seminar with Dr Toby Ord (Oxford) is this Friday, 4.00-5.30pm in Little Hall, Sidgwick SIte.
Toby Ord is a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University & Oxford Martin School. He works on theoretical and practical questions concerning population ethics, global priorities, existential risk and new technologies. He will be speaking on "Will we cause our own extinction? Natural versus anthropogenic extinction risks". It should be an excellent introduction to CSER's current research focus and arguments the lead to it. Full details here <http://cser.org/event/extinction/>. The abstract is below. Best wishes, Nick --- Abstract: *How will humanity go extinct? Is it more likely to be from natural causes such as an asteroid impact or anthropogenic causes such as a nuclear war? Using the fossil record, we can place a rough upper bound on the probability of human extinction from natural causes: all natural causes put together have less than a 1% chance of causing human extinction each century, and probably less than 0.1%. In contrast, it is very difficult to put upper or lower bounds on the chance of extinction from anthropogenic causes. * *In this talk, Dr Toby Ord advance an argument that anthropogenic causes currently produce ten or more times as much extinction risk as the natural causes, and shows how this suggests that we should prioritise the reduction of anthropogenic extinction risks over natural ones.* -- Nick Robinson Seminar Series Administrator Centre for the Study of Existential Risk University of Cambridge http://cser.org _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
