Page 22 - Existential Risk News Today

Add ground insects to pasta and burgers to overcome food supply issues, scientists say Future foods could feed isolated communities and overcome trade issues, a new paper has said State-of-the-art, enclosed and modular photo-bioreactors (PBR) to produce chlorella and spirulina algae.   Credit: Vaxa, Iceland Maggots and insects should be ground up and put into pasta to tackle food supply problems, Cambridge University academics have said. "Future foods" which are more resilient to climate chan...

April 22, 2021 From nuclear weapons to biowarfare to cyberattacks, humanity has much to overcome. Martin Rees and Frederick Lamb discuss the obstacles we must face as we look forward to humanity’s future on Earth. What is the fate of humanity – and other living creatures – on planet Earth? In the 21st century, we humans hold the key. Image via NASA. The American Physical Society met virtually this week, and – on April 19, 2021, at a press gathering – the U.K.’s Astronomer Royal Mart...

Discover the stupidity of AI emotion recognition with this little browser game Does your face match your feelings? Share this story Image: The Verge Tech companies don’t just want to identify you using facial recognition — they also want to read your emotions with the help of AI. For many scientists, though, claims about computers’ ability to understand emotion are fundamentally flawed, and a little in-browser web game built by researchers from the University of Cambridge aims to show wh...

Asked in 2003, the UK’s astronomer royal, Martin Rees, gave our present society 50/50 odds of lasting until the end of the century. It’s fair to say the odds haven’t improved in the years since he made this call. The planet is warming, a pandemic runs wild, the threat of nuclear war still hangs overhead and emerging technologies are allowing for the development of new weapons of mass destruction. Existential threats to human existence are growing – and the time left to address them gets...

 E-Mail IMAGE: Part 1 of a cartoon summary providing a brief excursion into what the future could like as these issues in bioengineering develop. Based on the bioengineering horizon scan published in... view more  Credit: Centre for Existential Risk, Cambridge University During the summer of 2019, a global team of experts put their heads together to define the key questions facing the UK government when it comes to biological security. Facilitated by the Centre for the Study of Exist...

Unforeseen consequences of new technologies put UK at risk Lords committee told that the risks associated with various emerging digital technologies must be assessed together, with input from UK citizens, if the government is to avoid ‘siloisation’ of fundamentally interconnected problems Share this item with your network: By Published: 14 Jan 2021 11:31 The UK government must focus on the relationships between different digital technologies when assessing their potential risks, which ...

Unfortunately, it’s precisely our short-term thinking that could mean life is far worse for future generations than it might otherwise be. How can we combat this deeply embedded short-termism and get people to think about centuries, millennia, and beyond? (File photo: Marco Xu/Unsplash) “Where do you see yourself in five years?” It’s a classic job interview question, designed to probe your level of ambition and aspiration. And it probes about as far ahead as many of us are likely to thi...

Jeremy Gaunt / Creative Commons Are we on the verge of societal collapse? We tend to worry about the big explosive stuff like nuclear war, asteroids, and solar flares when we consider end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios. The reality is that most "fallen" civilizations gradually decline over many decades with a banality that can barely register.  We often remember the decline of civilizations as the fault of poor leaders or natural disasters but its more like death from a thousand cut...

Disaster for the country like starting war or launching a nuke on purpose or not, or trying to dismantle other branches of government. thats one potential existential crisis for country with leadership problem. imagine creating new disaster out of whole cloth. other great existential risk is not hypothetical thing to worry about but something thats happening to some scale right now. its already killing americans. and thats not some sci-fi dystopian thing, its risk, inevitability that stuff will ...