Stanford Existential Risks Initiative
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The Stanford Existential Risks Initiative is a newly-established program within the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. The initiative seeks to bring together students and faculty at Stanford and beyond to study and find solutions to the threats posed by global catastrophic risks. We recommend SERI as a high-impact funding opportunity.
What problem are they trying to solve?
SERI focuses specifically on global catastrophic risks and existential threats to the future of humanity, such as risks from artificial intelligence, pandemics and biosecurity, nuclear war, and extreme climate change. You can read more about these risks in Founders Pledge’s report on Safeguarding the Future.
Within work on existential risks, we view SERI as solving a specific problem of academic discipline-building and creating a pipeline of experts working on existential risks. By bringing together top academics, practitioners, and students, SERI is helping to build an interdisciplinary academic field and channel promising students to focus on mitigating the gravest threats to the future of humanity.
Read SERI's mission statement here.
What do they do?
SERI is a collaboration between Stanford faculty and students at all levels, from freshman to postdoctoral. It is housed within the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), a long-standing hub for pressing global issues at Stanford. Currently, SERI’s activities include:
- Academic conferences on existential risk
- Mentored summer research fellowships
- Discussion groups
- Stanford classes focused on existential risk
Conferences on Existential Risk
SERI convenes conferences on existential risk and longtermism, including the recent (April 17-18, 2021) Stanford Existential Risks Conference. The conference brought together some of the world’s leading scholars (such as Stuart Russell, a renowned AI researcher) and practitioners (such as Rose Gottemoeller, a former Deputy Secretary General of NATO who negotiated the New START Treaty) to discuss a variety of existential risks and possible solutions.
Summer Research Fellowships
One of SERI’s flagship initiatives is a summer research internship co-hosted with researchers from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. For 10 weeks, accepted students work with mentors on research projects aimed at mitigating existential risks. Past projects have included a study of the “nuclear hotline,” forecasting “AI takeoff” speeds, and other projects on issues that we consider to be important for safeguarding the future of humanity.
Discussion groups
SERI runs discussion groups “for students interested in existential risks to learn and share ideas together.” Existing reading groups include:
- Existential Risks and Social Sciences Reading Group
- Introductory Transformative AI Safety Reading Group
- Bio-security Reading Group (in collaboration with Cambridge University)
- The Precipice Reading Group
Stanford classes
SERI grew out of a collaboration between SERI’s co-directors, Stephen Luby and Paul Edwards, to teach an interdisciplinary course on global catastrophic risks. Luby and Edwards still teach this class, “THINK 65: Preventing Human Extinction,” which introduces undergraduate students to the core concepts of existential risk.
Other initiatives
SERI was founded in 2020, and is still a very young organization. We expect their activities to expand to include other initiatives in the near future. For example, with more funding, SERI could host a postdoctoral fellow focusing specifically on existential risks (see below). They are interested in supporting development of additional coursework in, for example, reducing synthetic biology threats and unaligned artificial intelligence. These courses would allow which the students to further develop their understanding, focus and skills. SERI hopes to expand seed grant research funding to support Stanford PhD students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty working to address existential threats.
Why do we recommend them?
We view global catastrophic and existential risks as one of the most important issues a philanthropist could focus on, and believe SERI is well-positioned to grow the community of scholars and practitioners working to mitigate these risks. Open Philanthropy, our research partner, recommends SERI as a promising funding opportunity in global catastrophic risks.
Humanity is still in the early days of what we could achieve in the long run, and existential risks threaten to cut short this promise. Building out the academic field dedicated to the study of these risks will be a crucial part of preserving the future of humanity.
Although the risks are many, the number of organizations working on this issue are few, and we believe that SERI has the potential to grow into a major force in this area. Compared to other groups, SERI is still a young “start up,” which means that a philanthropist could have a potentially outsized effect by planting the seeds for SERI to grow into an influential research institution. Moreover, SERI is housed within two well-respected institutions, CISAC and Stanford, which provide the organization with credibility, access to some of the world’s smartest minds, and convening power. The list of participants at their first conference is evidence for this convening power.
Third, we believe that generating student interest and providing training to young people could help create a “talent pipeline” to lead more people to work on existential risks. Seeing the results of this pipeline will be slow, and measuring its impacts will be difficult. Nonetheless, based on our experience over the last 2 years we find it plausible that SERI’s work can help convince students to dedicate all or part of their careers to mitigating these risks, and that some of the students they incubate can become top scholars and policymakers working toward that end.
Why do we trust this organization?
For this recommendation, we are grateful to be able to utilize the in-depth expertise of, and background research conducted by, the Open Philanthropy Project, the world’s largest grant-maker on global catastrophic risk. Open Philanthropy identifies high-impact giving opportunities, makes grants, follows the results and publishes its findings. (Disclosure: Open Philanthropy has made several unrelated grants to Founders Pledge.)
SERI has received funding from Open Philanthropy and collaborates with scholars from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, two organizations whose judgment we trust.
Moreover, we have confidence in the co-directors of SERI, Stephen Luby and Paul Edwards. Luby is a professor of medicine (infectious diseases) with other senior appointments at Stanford and a high-quality publication record on pressing issues in global public health. Edwards is a senior research scholar at CISAC, an emeritus professor of information and history at the University of Michigan, and a Lead Author of the latest report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Finally, CISAC, the umbrella organization of SERI, is a respected hub for global policy with strong links to policymakers who are relevant to global catastrophic risks. For example, CISAC’s last co-director, Dr. Colin Kahl, is now U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the Biden Administration. Former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice began her career with a CISAC fellowship, as have several other prominent policymakers whose decisions affect existential risks.
What would they do with more funding?
SERI has room for funding to grow several of its initiatives. With more funding, SERI would support a postdoctoral fellow and help fund the salary for Dr. Paul Edwards, who is co-director of SERI.
- SERI Post-Doc: CISAC has told us that they are seeking funding on the order of $100,000 a year for a SERI post-doctoral fellow. The postdoc would conduct research on existential risks and teach 1-2 undergraduate courses on existential risks at Stanford.
- Salary for SERI Co-Director: Dr. Paul Edwards, SERI’s co-director and a senior research scholar at CISAC, does not have a tenured faculty position at Stanford. His work is supported by grants and gifts. $100,000 a year would help to cover part of Dr. Edwards’s salary.
What are the wider benefits of supporting this organization?
In addition to the benefits outlined above, there are other reasons to support SERI. One of these is that administrators at the most prestigious universities look to their peers (including what is informally known as the “Ivy Plus” group) or to highly-ranked schools in general to make decisions about funding allocation and new initiatives, and if SERI is successful, this could encourage other top schools to launch initiatives focused on existential risk.
A second wider benefit of funding SERI is that it could help to shape the incentives in academia to make applied work on pressing global problems more acceptable. As Hilary Greaves, a philosopher at Oxford and director of the Global Priorities Institute has explained, for many PhD students interested in working on issues like existential risks, “something very applied ... is going to be seen by the academic discipline as not intellectually very demanding,” and they will often have to delay such work until later in their career. The promise of a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, for example, may help to convince more students to study the applied issues that could truly make an impact.
What are the major open questions?
We have many uncertainties about the potential long-term impact of funding, and because SERI is a new organization and does not yet have a long track record, it may be riskier to fund than more established institutes. Importantly, its impact will be difficult to measure, as it is likely to be diffuse and slow — an undergraduate who becomes interested in existential risks through SERI may not be in a position to have a positive impact on the world for many years, and SERI’s influence may be one of many factors that shaped their career path.
Message from the organization
"The Stanford Existential Risk Initiative is led by two of CISAC’s distinguished scholars and leading experts on risks to humanity: Dr. Paul Edwards and Dr. Stephen Luby. Your support will ensure that Paul and Steve can continue to build SERI as part of CISAC’s mission of generating knowledge for a safer world. Your contribution can further ensure that new generations of experts on existential risks are trained and educated to conduct policy research and influence public policy for the better.
Many Stanford students are profoundly concerned about humanity’s future prospects. They enter the university today with direct experience of a global pandemic and anthropogenic climate change. Indeed, they are so aware of the numerous threats that they risk being paralyzed by hopelessness. In our 3 years of experience teaching Preventing Human Extinction, we have found that students respond with energy and enthusiasm when existential risks are clearly analyzed with solution-oriented thinking. Many hunger for opportunities to play a part in addressing these threats.
SERI supports a vigorous cross-generational conversation regarding lessons learned in prior efforts to address existential threats. We intend to develop coursework and research programs that allow students at all levels to focus their efforts on these enormous – yet not insurmountable – challenges."
