Existential Risk Observatory Newsletter #3
ERO on Tour, Call to Action, EAGxRotterdam Meetup, and much more!
Existential Risk Observatory on Tour!
We will be organizing several real-life events in the Netherlands in the near future, and it would be amazing if you joined us!
Artificial Intelligence and its role in Dutch society - a debate between a journalist and our director
First up, we have a debate organised in The Hague on the 24th of January - the evening before the commission in the Dutch Parliament will hold their big debate on Artificial Intelligence. Our debate will be between journalist Bennie Mols (NRC Handelsblad and author of Hallo Robot) and our director and founder Otto Barten on Artificial Intelligence, its role in existential risks and the role the Netherlands can play. Please register your interest here, or just come along and be at Dudok, The Hague at 19:30 sharp on the 24th of January! And of course, there will be a chance to say cheers with us on hosting this event and to the New Year afterwards at Restaurant Luden. This debate will be held in English. Please also let us know if you have any other (accessibility) request, we are more than happy to accommodate those.
Existential Risks: Why we need to talk about it
Next to our debate in the Hague, we will be hosting another debate in the spring of 2023 in Amsterdam. At this debate, we aim for big international speakers to discuss the latest on Existential Risks. We are currently preparing for this, and you can register your interest for this debate here.
Call to action: We need you!
The Existential Risk Observatory is growing in the Netherlands, and we have big ambitions for 2023! To this end, we could really use your help. You can support us by:
Attending our events (some of them will be partly online in the future, so non-Netherlands based people be on the look-out for that!),
Organizing your own events (we can of course support you),
Writing letters or op-eds to newspapers (this can be outside the Netherlands too of course, we have plenty of pitches if you want a framework),
Other voluntary work. Check out our page on how you can support us.
Profile: Alexia Georgiadis
We have a new colleague! Alexia is the new Communications intern at the Existential Risk Observatory: “I have always been interested in understanding complex societal issues such as social and economic inequality. This has been my focus throughout my academic career and my personal interest. After graduating from university, I embarked on a journey to find a job that resonated with my quest to contribute meaningfully to society. That's when I found the Effective Altruism movement and got to realize that societal issues may go beyond the near future and could be of disastrous scale. At the Observatory, I work to find the most optimal ways to communicate to people about existential risks, as such threats are of large scale and are still little researched or known by the general public. We are currently collecting data on the effectiveness of media items in conveying information about existential risk to the public and will soon start the data analysis phase. I'm very excited for the results and what has to come!”
EAGxRotterdam Meetup
Did you meet us at EAGxRotterdam2022? At this conference, Otto Barten en Kritika Maheswari presented the Existential Risk Observatory and hosted a discussion session on whether human extinction is actually bad. We discussed questions around the meaning of existential risks, the good and bad things about bringing it into the public debate and how our own action can decrease it. Find the slides here.
We were very happy with the turnout! It’s great to see that there is such growing interest in (countering) existential risks - and if our meetup is where you found out about our newsletter, welcome.
Media - In the News
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our lives. You unlock your phone using facial recognition and then ask your phone to open your social media. The things you see on your social media feed as well as the (annoying) ads you get are all the result of AI recognising and predicting your personal preferences.
But AI can do even more: We recently saw robots with AI in front of classrooms to teach, can create entire works of art, and can even program computers themselves. While funny and sometimes practical, incorrect or irresponsible use of AI can lead to far-reaching consequences.
The Dutch childcare benefits scandal, in which ill-considered application of an algorithm caused children to be unjustly placed out of home, and where increasing money worries caused relationships to fall apart, is a well-known example. Even with this much simpler technology than what AI is capable of, dangers lurk. Our opinion piece, published in De Telegraaf (in Dutch only), dives deeper into this.
Other news
A new piece on our website in response to an opinion piece in de Volkskrant (Dutch only).
NRC writes about longtermism in the wake of FTX’s demise (Dutch only).
Latest AI development is that it has won Diplomacy.
Follow us on our social channels (see below) to see the latest updates, as well as an interesting read or listen every Friday that we share on existential risks.