Video: Civilization Collapse - Scenarios, Prevention, Response

At this Salon hosted by the Foresight Institute, David Denkenberger and I talk about the risks of civilizational collapse and how we can mitigate them.

I describe some of the key uncertainties around our current models of global risk and how we can reduce these uncertainties to better model future risks. For example, it has long been hypothesized that a nuclear war could trigger massive global cooling, but only a handful of studies have been done on this hypothetical scenario. Further work in this field would help us weigh direct harms from nuclear war against the second order harms of climatic effects. Other areas of global risk are even more neglected…