x-Risk Course / The open edition

Existential Risk:
An Open Course

Course Description

This course addresses scientific approaches to important environmental, public health, or technology issues through the topic of existential risk. By combining relevant scientific perspectives with the traditional study of risk, this course will provide students a framework to understand and assess a variety of risks. We will discuss various risk management strategies and how to apply them, both in traditional risk settings as well as to existential risk.

The main focus of the course is on “existential” risks or “global catastrophic” risks. These are society-level risks so large that they might impact (and potentially kill) everyone, and where potential responses must be at the societal level. These include the risks associated with climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and asteroids/comets/volcanoes that cannot be managed with traditional insurance products.

Origins and Why This Course Is Public

Professor Stephen H. Shore originally designed and taught this course in person to undergraduate students at Georgia State University. Since, the risks discussed in this course affect people far beyond a university classroom. Making it public gives people who are not enrolled at Georgia State access to the same ideas, evidence, and scientific perspectives. Someone concerned about pandemics or artificial intelligence should have the opportunity to study the arguments in some depth, including the uncertainty and disagreement behind them.

The public version keeps the teaching materials and removes assignments, grading, and semester deadlines. You can follow the whole course or spend more time with a particular topic. The purpose is to make a considered study of these risks available to anyone interested in understanding them.

Designed for

You do not need a background in economics, philosophy, or the sciences to begin. This course is for people who want to understand how claims about large-scale risks are made, what evidence supports them, and where uncertainty remains.

You will consider how the probability and severity of a risk can be assessed using historical evidence, scientific models, and forecasts. You will also examine what familiar responses, such as insurance and prevention, can accomplish, and why risks affecting humanity as a whole raise different problems. Throughout the course, the aim is to help you weigh competing arguments and reach judgments you can explain, while recognizing the limits of the available evidence.

Five modules