To face down existential risks like climate change and nuclear war, we need communities, not just big institutions

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This is a very fulsome document from the UNDP (the United Nations Development Program), titled Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World (pdf version).

We found intriguing this contribution from Toby Ord, imagining what institutions we would need to manage existential risk. See our challenge at the end:

Humanity has faced many natural existential risks over the 3,000 centuries we have survived so far— such as risks from asteroid impacts or supervolcanic eruptions. But the anthropogenic risks we now face appear much greater in probability and continue to rise as our power over the world grows ever greater. It is unclear whether we can survive another three centuries, let alone three thousand.

To survive, we need to achieve two things. We must first bring the current level of existential risk down— putting out the fires we already face from the threat of nuclear war and climate change. But we cannot al- ways be fighting fires.

A defining feature of existential risk is that there are no second chances—a single existential catastrophe would be our permanent un- doing. So we must also create the equivalent of fire brigades and fire-safety codes—making institutional changes to ensure that existential risk (including that from new technologies and developments) stays low forever.

If we can achieve both these things, we will have reached existential security: a return to comparative safety, where we have ended the era of heightened risk to humanity. This would be no utopia. Existential security would not guarantee universal human development or freedom—or health and prosperity. But it would be necessary to achieve any of those things—a foundation on which they rest.

One way to look at our current position is that humanity faces a high and unsustainable level of risk. Indeed, we can see this as one of the most fundamental tal kinds of sustainability. Think of the probability that humanity will continue to survive and flourish over a time span comparable with the 3,000 centuries we have lived so far.

Each year that our time of heightened risk goes on, this probability of a successful future drops. And nothing we ever do could restore that chance. The probability of humanity surviving to live out its potential is the ultimate nonrenewable resource: something we depend on completely—with no possible substitutes—but are frittering away. Existential security means stabilizing humanity’s survival curve—greatly reducing the risk and ensuring that it stays low. Only by doing so can we keep the probability of long-term survival high

What would be required to stem this loss—to reach existential security?

A large part of the answer has to come from international institutions. Existential security is inherently international: the risks that could destroy us transcend national boundaries, and finding ways forward that never once succumb to an existential catastrophe will require international coordination. Meeting this challenge would be an extremely difficult but necessary task. Here are some broad outlines of what it would require.

As Carl Sagan wrote: “The world-altering powers that technology has delivered into our hands now re- quire a degree of consideration and foresight that has never before been asked of us.” We need the fore- sight to see the risks while they are still on the horizon, providing time to steer around them or, if that is impossible, to prepare to meet them.

This involves knowing how to ask the right questions about future dangers. And while being able to accurately answer such questions is impossible, great progress is being made in systematically assigning well-calibrated and accurate probabilities to them. An institution aimed at existential security would need to harness this progress and be at the forefront of forecasting expertise.

It would also require extremely high trust: from both the public and the elites across many different nation states. Perhaps it could learn from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with its attempts to neutrally establish the current state of scientific consensus on climate change in a transparent manner, with input from all nations.

An institution for existential security would need extremely strong coordinating ability. Because exis- tential risk threatens a common foundation on which all of our varied hopes and futures are built, it is in every nation’s interest to avoid it.

But because different strategies and tactics for avoiding risk will have burdens that fall unevenly upon the nations, there are still great challenges for coordinating a path forward that everyone can accept.

Finally, such an institution would require a great deal of buy-in. This would have to be both strong and lasting.

Strong buy-in would be required before the idea of an institution to govern existential risks could even get off the ground, as nations will not lightly make the sacrifices in sovereignty that would be required. While there is not sufficient buy-in at the moment, this may change over years or decades as people slowly face up to the gravity of the threats facing humanity.

And just as the United Nations was formed in the wake of the crisis and catastrophe of the Second World War, in the wake of new global crises and threats, the idea of new institutions with the power to achieve existential security may move quickly from unthinkable to inevitable.

Our resolve would have to be lasting. National constitutions provide proof that building institutional constraints that last hundreds of years is possible. Designing a constitution means setting in place the parameters for our descendants to operate across generations—as well as the means to adjust those parameters if circumstances change in unforeseen ways.

Building institutions to reach existential security would have much in common with formulating a constitution—not just for a nation, but for humanity, and with a focus on ensuring that each generation co- operates to give succeeding generations the chance the exist and flourish in their turn.

More here (pp. 58-9). We appreciate Toby’s argument, but we are fascinated to see that the limits of his premise - that managing existential risk primarily needs robust, global institutions - are so obvious. What of the many networked and fractal phenomena in the social movements and entrepreneurs we cover, and liase with, at the Alternative Global?

Particularly on the question of trust, it seems at least necessary that this is generated upwards from a grassroots and community level, rather than expecting that the political elites/classes of nations (or even international entities like the IPCC) will be able to generate the needed legitimacy.

See our themes of I, Planetarian and Socio-politics for more.