The programme aims to provide students with a thorough grounding in Global Catastrophic and Existential Risk, how this can be managed and mitigated, and its relationship with transformative sociotechnological trends.

The programme will provide students with a specific toolset of concepts, methods, and approaches that have been developed by leading researchers working to understand and mitigate the most extreme forms of global risk.

It aims to:

• Provide students with a rigorous understanding of the emerging transdisciplinary field of ERS, with a focus both on training future researchers in its methods and approaches and producing a cohort of well-informed partners in relevant positions across policy and industry to help mitigate global risk;
• Develop students’ ability to critically engage with a wide range of interdisciplinary research on risk drivers, multipliers, and mitigation challenges, the core skills required to study unprecedented and extreme future risk, and the opportunity to put these to work in both a focused individual study of specific global challenges and a participatory foresight exercise;
• Introduce students to a variety of mitigation opportunities and challenges, focusing on the reality of policymaking in relevant areas (such as AI, biosecurity, climate change, and nuclear policy) and the different impact strategies and theories of change that can influence these.
• Establish and promote standards of rigorous and responsible research in this area, highlighting both the need for high quality research and the pitfalls of irresponsible practises, drawing on a rich history of research, policy, and activism.
• Equip student to apply insights from this area of research to related disciplines such as Science and Technology Studies, Disaster Studies, Philosophy, Economics, International Relations, Biosecurity, and AI and for risk or technology focused careers across government, industry, and civil society. 

Learning Outcomes:

Knowledge and Understanding:

• An in-depth survey of the emerging transdisciplinary field of Existential Risk Studies, including key concepts, ethical and epistemological challenges, methods, approaches, and tools, and impact and outreach strategies.

• Critical engagement with the historical and sociological development of the field, and of broader awareness about existential and global catastrophic risk, the factors influencing this, and the difficulties in producing rigorous and responsible research in this area.

• A systematic interdisciplinary understanding of risk drivers, risk multipliers, and risk mitigation challenges that contribute to the current level of existential and global catastrophic risk (AI, biosecurity, environmental change, global-scale natural catastrophes, and nuclear security).

• A critical awareness of the range of proposals for risk mitigation and the governance of science, technology, and other anthropogenic risk drivers, their feasibility, potential benefits and drawbacks, and relationship to existing policies, institutions, and movements.

Skills and other attributes:

• Expertise at implementing methodologies that have been developed by researchers in existential risk studies, including the use of analytical risk assessment frameworks, the application of futures, foresight, and horizon scanning to risk assessment and evaluation, the construction of plausible, useful, and engaging scenarios tools, and the application of robust decision-making tools for dealing with uncertainty.

• Familiarity with a wider range of disciplinary perspectives on existential and global catastrophic risk and the methodologies used in constructing them, including the ability to implement these where appropriate.

• The ability to translate knowledge and concepts between academic, policy, and industry contexts, including experience with participatory methods and policy co-design tools.

• The ability to construct and deconstruct popular narratives about existential and global catastrophic risk, and communicate research responsibly for a broad audience.

Continuing:

Students admitted to the MPhil can apply to continue as PhD students with a relevant Faculty. For details on the PhD application process and required standards, students should consult the respective Department.