Catastrophic and Existential Risks & World Orders

Course Description

This course focuses on the politics of emerging natural and technogenic catastrophic and existential risks (CAER). The emergence and acceleration of machine-based civilization devoted to the progressive development of science-based technology has produced a fundamentally novel human situation, and the emergence of a horizon of potential disasters, catastrophes and threats to human existence. Some threats, such as super-volcanoes and asteroidal collisions, have purely natural origins. Others, such as nuclear war, bioweapons, nanotechnology, artificial superintelligence, totalitarian government and climate change are anthropogenic. Some, such as geo-engineering, space colonization and asteroidal diversion, appear to be solutions, but may also pose severe, but under-appreciated, threats. International theory is largely unprepared to conceptualize such threats, or suitable solutions to them. Many of the novel technologies have both civil and military applications. Some are increasingly accessible to small non-state actors. Foresight capacities to anticipate negative consequences of new technologies are severely limited, and powerful interests are deeply committed to their largely unhindered development. Several of these technologies may enable the establishment of highly hierarchical world government, and regulatory regimes capable of restraining them may require world government to be effective. The globally hegemonic ideology of Baconian Promethean modernism is strongly committed to unlimited scientific and technological development, making efforts to restrain, regulate or relinquish such technologies very difficult. This course focuses on the contours of these threats, the ways in which they are activated by different political factors, the features of regimes necessary to restrain them, and the implications for world order of these threats and responses to them.

Code

AS.190.478

Credits

3

Subject

Political Science