A talk with James Hughes
Physicists, zombies, rogue nanobots, and other long-odds threats to life as we know it.
By Peter Bebergal | September 7, 2008 | Boston Globe
ON WEDNESDAY, HUNDREDS of feet below ground in Europe, a proverbial switch will be pulled on the Large Hadron Collider, a new multibillion dollar machine designed to smash subatomic particles together at immense speeds. The device could help physicists rewrite the rules of the universe. It could also, just possibly, do something else: create a tiny black hole that would result in the end of all life as we know it.
Most scientists are confident that the danger is vanishingly small, and a number of research papers have concluded the experiment is safe. But are the potential gains to science really worth even a tiny risk of eradicating the earth? This question, writ large, is the province of a group of scholars who study potential global catastrophe. At the center of their work lies an almost unanswerable question: How should we deal with very unlikely threats that also carry the potential to extinguish human civilization?
This past July, specialists convened in Oxford, England, for the first Global Catastrophic Risks Conference. The group included philosophers, physicists, and sociologists; aside from the huge particle accelerator, they looked at the threat of massive asteroid collisions, gamma ray bursts from supernovas that could sterilize the planet, man-made nanobots that could replicate and consume the earth’s surface, and out-of-control artificial intelligence.
James Hughes, a lecturer in public policy at Trinity College and the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, spoke at the conference on how apocalyptic fears (and hopes) inhibit clear thinking about catastrophic risks. A sociologist by training, Hughes is optimistic that humanity will be sufficiently technologically savvy by the time it faces some of the more awful possible predicaments. But he also suggests that we do need to start focusing on some long-term threats.
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Ideas spoke with Hughes by phone at his home in Willington, Conn.
IDEAS: What are some of the man-made risks we should be concerned about?
HUGHES: Well, there are the traditional 20th-century man-made risks that most people think about, the weapons of mass destruction risks: nuclear weapons, bioterrorism. Chemical weapons are not really part of the picture. But bioterrorism could theoretically create some kind of agents that could wipe out most of humanity.
(Read the rest of the interview here)
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