Global Challenges Project

What problem is the Global Challenges Project working on?

We may be in a crucial century for humanity, with the plausible advent of transformative artificial intelligence and high levels of destabilising risk from bioengineered pandemics. The Global Challenges Project believes that the risk of an existential catastrophe and permanent negative lock-in event occurring in the next 80 years is significant — perhaps 1 in 6.

But people are right to be sceptical of these claims. If they’re true, they would have drastic implications for how we should approach helping the world.

The Global Challenges Project believes that students can go on to have a huge positive social impact with their lives. But thinking through how to make a difference can be a complex and difficult problem. The Global Challenges Project aims to equip students with tools and ideas that help them on their journey to maximise the positive impact they have on the world.

What does the Global Challenges Project do?

The Global Challenges Project runs workshops for students to grapple with and evaluate these arguments about existential risks. The three-day residential workshops bring together like-minded students who want to think ambitiously and critically about exploring issues around existential risk and how they can have a positive impact with their careers. They take place in various locations, and financial support is available to make these events accessible to all.

In addition to workshops on existential risk, the Global Challenges Project maintains a library of materials to explore various other problems and solutions that students may wish to pursue with their careers, including:

• Effective altruism and longtermism
• Artificial intelligence safety and governance
• Biosecurity
• Technical materials on alternative proteins
• Wild animal welfare

This charity meets the requirements to be supported by Giving What We Can as an unlisted charity — read more about our inclusion criteria.

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