Professor/Deputy Director, Research Center for Brain-inspired Intelligence |
Director, Research Center for AI Ethics and Safety

What advice do you have for people coping with this crisis?

We should definitely learn from and share each other’s experiences. This is not easy when people are with different cultures, but it is exactly why it is important to see why people and countries with different cultures have different approaches to deal with this crisis. What can we learn to complement with each other is the real key to build the shared future for humanity.

What do we need to do to be prepared for future pandemics?

Pandemics prediction system at large-scale should be strengthened, with even more transparent data contributions from different countries and regions. Surveillance systems and services related to healthcare are widely deployed for this COVID-19 pandemics. We need to learn and decide what can be left as possible infrastructures to support avoiding future pandemics, but cannot be too much that may have negative side effect for human agency, privacy, and human rights in general.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about other catastrophic risks like nuclear war, AI, etc?

Lack of strategic design and long-term research for preventing and fighting against potential catastrophic risks is a lesson we should learn from COVID-19 pandemics, but this definitely also applies to long-term AI. It is still not clear when we are going to have AGI and Supperintelligence, but it is quite clear that no matter which way we are going to realize them, there could be various different potential catastrophic risks, and we definitely need strategic design and long-term research for reducing the risks and avoiding the catastrophic ones on our way to AGI and Supperintelligence. In addition, we should have a very well coordinated global team to ensure beneficial AGI and superintelligence, taking challenges from various technical and cultural perspectives, sharing, and bridging the efforts for the whole societies.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about how to make humanity more resilient in general?

We should have learned the fact that humanity is very vulnerable, and we are tightly interconnected not only with each other, but also with the environment, and we are only a portion of the ecosystem. Continuous efforts should be made to make sure our connections to each other and the environment are in positive and sustainable ways. During but not limited to pandemics, we should not blame or even hurt each other in any way, but to hold hands tightly and bridge our efforts together for the symbiotic societies.

Professor of Physics

What advice do you have for people coping with this crisis?

Strong collective action can — and is the only thing that can — allow us to overcome the crisis. I’ve been inspired many people’s dedication on this front and encourage others to see that this is the norm rather than the exception, and to be as patient and kind as possible with all those who are in this mess with them!

What do we need to do to be prepared for future pandemics?

There will be a temptation to take steps to ensure that this exact crisis does not happen again. That’s good, but the next crisis will very likely be different, so we should pay attention to the predictions of those who have thought carefully about the question of what are the most likely scenarios and especially what can be done to protect against many possibilities at once.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about other catastrophic risks like nuclear war, AI, etc?

There are a lot of problems — and pandemics are just one — where there is a significant amount of warning, but you have to listen quite closely, and pay attention to the probabilities. When something has the potential for runaway growth, you can’t wait until it is actually causing significant problems, because that is too late. You have to take seriously the idea that if a calamity is 1% probable, then you should put a very, very significant amount of effort into preventing its occurrence. It’s much better to do so before it gets to be 90% probable or more!

What can we learn from COVID-19 about how to make humanity more resilient in general?

Humanity is, in general, quite resilient. We’ll survive this and would survive many, many calamities. But that’s not what we want — we want to avoid them! I suggest we try very, very hard to think of some way to provide a reward system for tragedies averted, and not just for bravely persevering through them (as important and noble as that is) when they occur.

Physician-Scientist

What advice do you have for people coping with this crisis?
Advice is hard to give in a crisis, as how people cope with uncertainty is very personal. For me, part of it is accepting this is hard, many things are beyond our control, and it’s ok to feel frustrated and sad about that. Find the bright spots in this temporary way of living, and take solace in knowing that this will end. Also acknowledging that the ability to stay safe and cope with COVID-19 is sadly unevenly distributed across socioeconomic lines. It is much easier to deal with this crisis if you are able to stock up food, shelter at home and work from there. So also focusing on gratitude for being able to stay safe if you’re privileged to be in that boat, and staying home to protect others. Also, for me, limiting my reading of the news to once a day has been really helpful in not getting overwhelmed by all of the information, and misinformation, out there.

What do we need to do to be prepared for future pandemics?
Beyond ensuring appropriate stockpiles of medical equipment and supplies, and identifying and mitigating supply chain vulnerabilities, for future pandemics it’s become clear we need a robust, international, coordinated response at earliest signs of an outbreak. I think COVID-19 has been a painful lesson in exponentials, and there is now a widespread appreciation by both the public and policy makers of why early action is vital to pandemic control. Beyond coordination, there is also a need to examine how we can harness, develop, and deploy technology to massively improve our ability to detect and contain future pandemics at the first signs to prevent global spread. Such real time monitoring data would also be very helpful for the dissemination clinical and genomic data about the pathogen.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about other catastrophic risks like nuclear war, AI, etc?
COVID-19 is a cautionary tale, as we see the devastating impact it has had worldwide, and it does not even meet the conventional definition of a global catastrophic risk. It has shown us that bad things happen, we’re not well prepared to deal with them, and that we’re left selecting between bad outcomes, when the only good outcome would have been prevention. Prevention as the only path to a good outcome is at the core of each of the catastrophic risks, and it’s my hope that a silver lining of COVID-19 will be renewed interest, efforts and resources in risk mitigation and safety engineering. This is especially relevant when we think of things such as accidental nuclear war, which is entirely solvable with our resources and knowledge today. Similarly, when we think towards AI risk, while there are unknowns here, there is so much we can do in terms of safety engineering to mitigate foreseeable risks going forward, same goes for the risks of synthetic biology.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about how to make humanity more resilient in general?
I’m hoping that COVID-19 will enable us, as a society, to actually see the value of prevention. My background is in medicine and public health. The medical community has known for decades there is less suffering and expense to preventing disease as opposed to treating it, but preventative health has always struggled for resources that are event remotely in the ballpark of those allocated to therapeutics development. I think this is a similar metaphor of thinking about how we boost humanity’s resilience to these sorts of events: you need to invest in robust mitigation and contingency planning as well as the development of interventions if those preventative measures fail. Inherent to this approach is an ability to engage in long term thinking, which has not been humanity’s strong suit to date. Here’s hoping that this terrible tragedy can spur a shift in the positive direction.

Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge |

Cofounder, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk

Things we should be careful not to forget:

1. Remember the sense that it came out of nowhere, and that even experts don’t seem to have been able to conceptualise what was going to happen – even when they had experts in China and WHO telling them what was going to happen. There’s something structural here that we need to fix, or find ways to work around. (It is partly a human psychological issue, a difficulty in seeing bad news, and partly a structural problem in the way that science and policy advice works.) In one sense, none of this is news, but now we have all lived through a real case of it – we mustn’t let that experience go to waste! 🙂

2. Remember all the kindness that emerged in our communities, as people tried to deal with this together … and let’s try to steer a bit of that kindness towards the future, to make it easier to take responsibility for what happens to future generations.

Find more of Huw’s lockdown reflections here.

Founding Director

What do we need to do to be prepared for future pandemics?

As destructive as COVID-19 has been, we must prepare for future pandemics that could be much worse. Whether from natural outbreaks, lab accidents, or deliberate attacks, humanity remains vulnerable to pathogens that could kill hundreds of millions of people. We need to bolster our biodefenses, from disease monitoring to the development of flexible and broad-spectrum diagnostics, vaccines, and antivirals. COVID-19 has provided a painful lesson about our vulnerabilities — let’s learn as much as we can from this pandemic so that we’re better prepared for the next one.

Professor of the Natural Sciences

Exhalation during normal breathing and talking produces aerosols consisting of very small particles. Aerosol particles have diameters in the micron range, too small to settle appreciably under gravity. Instead, they are carried by air currents and dispersed by diffusion and air turbulence. Certain persons called “super spreaders” produce especially large amounts of aerosol. Because they are so small, aerosol particles do not have enough kinetic energy when inhaled to cause them to impact on surfaces in the respiratory tree. Instead, they follow flow lines down to the depths of the lungs where they may deposit in the alveoli.

Experimentally-produced aerosols containing COVID-19 virions have been found to remain infectious as assayed on tissue culture, with no reduction in infectivity during a 3-hour period of observation. Aerosols from infected persons may therefore pose an inhalation threat even at considerable distances and in enclosed spaces, particularly if there is poor ventilation. The possible contribution of infective aerosols to the current pandemic suggests the advisability of wearing a suitable mask whenever it is thought that infected persons may be nearby and of providing adequate ventilation of enclosed spaces in which such persons are known to be or may recently have been.

Research Associate

What advice do you have for people coping with this crisis?

To stay informed by following the social media of the World Health Organization and their own governments. In addition, they can also join different initiatives such as Skype a Scientist, the bot to answer questions about COVID19 from the young scientists in the USA, or follow blogs in your own language that belong to trustful sources (for example the bulletin made by the scientists at Ekpa’palek in Latin America).

What do we need to do to be prepared for future pandemics?

As citizens, we need to observe the decisions that our political leaders are taking and evaluate them step by step so in the future we can have an informed vote. We need leaders that work not only on mitigating but on preventing future pandemics.
As scientists, we need to publish our results it in open sources so collaboration and sharing of information can happen faster and more efficiently.
As advisors of policymakers, we need to learn how to communicate uncertainty and interact with experts from other disciplines.
As politicians, we need to listen to scientists and to experts in economics, law and even citizens if we want to make better decisions.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about other catastrophic risks like nuclear war, AI, etc?

That we definitely need more research in the science of global risks.
Those governments should put in place cautionary monitoring of different types of risks and develop a system that can manage surprises in a resilient, flexible, and immediate way.
Risk management should be always part of the process of monitoring these risks and should include close supervising and protocols for strict containment of potential hazard.
Governments or international entities should create a plan of action for what to do in case of catastrophic risks, this can be done by leveraging on the research performed at institutions such as CSER, FHI, CFI, FHI, etc.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about how to make humanity more resilient in general?

Behavioural studies are very important and especially behavioural economics since it seems that the economic factor is crucial when taking government decision in relation to pandemics.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I am a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and I am happy to answer any further questions and I am interested in building bridges of future collaborations. I am particularly interested in how understanding global risks can make our governments take better decisions.

Professor of Computer Science & Engineering

What advice do you have for people coping with this crisis?

Get information and follow advice from reliable, expert sources — primarily
infectious disease experts and public-health epidemiologists.

What do we need to do to be prepared for future pandemics?

We can analyze what went wrong this time and put in place the necessary resources and
plans to avoid these problems next time. Clearly there has to be a capability to roll out testing
at scale and to provide surge capacity for hospitals. We also need much more sophisticated
and flexible models that capture the patterns of contacts and transmission at an individual level, can predict the effects of different kinds of intervention, etc.
It seems that the best model of the US was the one created at Imperial College London, which should be concern for US policy makers.

However, nothing can be done if knowledge and expertise are discarded in favor
of political expediency and prejudice. Undoubtedly there will be a massive public relations war after
the pandemic dies down, to try to blame events on anyone but those responsible.
Indeed, this war is already beginning, with attacks on China, doctors, journalists,
old people, epidemiologists, etc.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about other catastrophic risks like nuclear war, AI, etc?

Bad things happen, so be prepared. Just because a risk is not certain, that doesn’t mean we don’t prepare for it
or attempt to prevent it. We have spare tires in our cars in case of a flat. We have a military in case of a war.
The costs are massive if and when the catastrophe occurs, while the costs of prevention and mitigation may be relatively tiny.

Distinguished Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences

What can we learn from COVID-19 about other catastrophic risks like nuclear war, AI, etc?

The two threats I worry most about are global warming and nuclear war. The difference between these and the COVID-19 pandemic is that they are completely man-made, in the sense that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases emitted by human activity, and nuclear war could be produced by man-made nuclear weapons. The cause of the pandemic is still not clear, and is probably associated with a jump from animals to humans as an indirect product of human invasion of natural systems for food or other purposes, but the direct link is less clear. On the other hand, we completely understand how greenhouse gases cause global warming, and we completely understand how the use of nuclear weapons would produce horrendous direct effects from blast, fires, and radiation, and indirect climate and agricultural effects from the smoke that would be produced by the fires, including nuclear winter from a war between the U.S. and Russia. And the reason we cannot easily solve the global warming and nuclear problems is that powerful industries have a financial interest in not solving them.

What AI, pandemics, global warming, and nuclear war have in common is that experts have been warning the world about them for quite a while. The 2017 book “Warnings; Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes,” by Richard A. Clarke and R. P. Eddy, describes such alarms. The first nine chapters are about Missed Warnings, and the next eight are about Current Warnings. Chapter 10 is AI, 11 is pandemics, 12 is global warming, and 13 is nuclear winter (featuring me).

The lesson from the current pandemics is that we have to listen to experts, and prepare or eliminate these potential threats to humanity. I’m no expert on AI or pandemics, but it would be simple to solve the global warming and nuclear winter problems. For global warming, we need to quickly switch to solar and wind power and build more robust energy storage systems and grids. For nuclear winter, we just have to eliminate the 14,000 nuclear weapons that still exist. The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change shows the way forward for global warming, and the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is the path to eliminate the nuclear threat.

To sum up, listen to scientists and experts.

Senior Research Fellow

What do we need to do to be prepared for future pandemics?

We now know a lot about how to do prepare better for the stage of the pandemic that hit Europe and America, such as better PPE stockpiles, more ventilators, and keeping spare capacity in the health system. But we should also think more about what we need to do before and during the very start of an outbreak. We need to learn the lesson about how strong early action would have been worth trillions of dollars — far more than would have seemed reasonable at the time. But this is the way with preventative measures, successful measures always look out of proportion with the damages that follow: the point is to be in proportion with the damages that *don’t* follow (the damages you prevent).

We would also do well to invest a vast amount in disease surveillance — in new diagnostic techniques, such as nanopore sequencing that may be able to detect outbreaks of novel pathogens substantially earlier than with COVID-19. And especially important — this would also help with engineered pandemics.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about other catastrophic risks like nuclear war, AI, etc?

Humanity is still vulnerable.

Humanity is bad at learning from previous catastrophes when the memories have faded, and even worse if the catastrophe is unprecedented. So we need to take this into account and try especially hard to learn from the most relevant information we have (e.g. near misses or similar events).

We need to listen to our experts and pay the comparatively small costs they suggest for preventing the catastrophes that are predictable. While it can be very difficult to predict such events, the problem here was not one of failures to predict, but of not listening to the predictions we do have.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about how to make humanity more resilient in general?

Having great lines of communication and honest sharing of information means that we can learn from each others’ experience even if some countries are struck just a week or two earlier. But we also need to be prepared to actually act on this — to realise that it can happen here just as easily.

Co-founder

What do we need to do to be prepared for future pandemics?

It feels to me that the most general component of preparedness would be to have protocols in place for tracking and limiting the contagion. for example, quickly deployable tools and policies for contact tracing as well as social isolation. That plus pre-agreed ability to accelerate clinical research by making different safety tradeoffs than “peacetime” research.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about other catastrophic risks like nuclear war, AI, etc?

I think the most important lesson here by far is that humanity will have species-wide emergencies in the future, so being dismissive about “tail risks” is myopic and harmful.

What can we learn from COVID-19 about how to make humanity more resilient in general?

My hope is that COVID-19 will function as a “minimum viable catastrophe” (Tim Urban just wrote a great story about that) that would make people and governments more enthusiastic about initiatives that are aimed at reducing global catastrophic risks (GCR-s) and existential risks (xrisks).