Foreseeing and reacting to globally catastrophic and existential events.

The Foresight team’s goal is to monitor current events, update forecasts of these events leading to large-scale and existential catastrophes, alert the emergency response team when they deem the risk high enough, and support the emergency response team with ongoing forecasts if necessary. Crucially, the time-scales on which the Foresight team forecasts is that which judgemental forecasting is best suited to. Examples of events that could escalate into global risks are the invasion of Ukraine, cyberattacks/malfunctions, North Korean missile tests, or Sam Altman joking that “AGI has been achieved internally”.

In the event of a potentially upcoming catastrophe, the Foresight team alerts the Emergency Response team, then the public, then proceeds to work with the Emergency Response team to discern future scenarios and their probabilities.

The goal of the Emergency Response team is to ensure that advance warning from the Foresight team translates into effective action as fast as possible.

For instance, if this team had existed when the Samotsvety forecasting team foresaw the Russian invasion of Ukraine about two weeks before it happened, one potential action would have been to get people with crucial skills needed outside Russia in planes before it closed its borders for those drafted. For another example, the Epidemic Forecasting team was quickly sprung up while COVID was starting, and ended up advising a few governments in underdeveloped countries. Or, if the likelihood of WW3 seems to spike, there could be many possible courses of actions one could take, starting with stockpiling reserves. As a last example, in case of an extreme abrupt sunlight reduction scenario, ALLFED has some preliminary plans to turn wood into edible food, which could be set into motion.

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