• Of Critical Importance: Toward a quantitative probabilistic risk assessment framework for critical infrastructure, Ivo Nas, Ira Helsloot, Eric Cator
• Why states are not keeping us safe in the long run: the theory and practice of preventing future societal destabalization, Bas Heerma van Voss, Ira Helsloot

Panel description

Dealing with long-term risks is increasingly core business of states in developed nations. Over the past century, material discomforts of and risks to the average peace-time inhabitant of a developed country have decreased significantly. Simultaneously, our tools for scientific assessments of future risks have improved drastically. As a consequence, most developed nations now have analytical capacities, financial means and political space to deal with long term risks such as climate change, the emergence of malign artificial intelligence and future pandemics. Wealth makes fearful. But how to rationalize a states’ response to the unthinkable – a catastrophe that could destabilize the whole of society? In this panel we look at how states try to predict the future, assess its risks and strive to lessen their impact.

Recent experience has demonstrated the weight of this question. Covid-19 laid bare a wide divergence in preparedness of governments in developed countries. Although governments of countries with more intensive experiences of previous coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS were, generally speaking, better positioned to respond, not all cross-country variation in preparedness can be traced back to previous experience with (threats of) an epidemic. One potential source of variation is a difference in the capability of countries to effectively predict the risk of a pandemic. Another is the capability of states to act effectively on that knowledge.

These two state capacities – to accurately gauge long-term destabilizing risks and, subsequently, to act effectively upon that knowledge – are of consequence to a wide range of policy domains, reaching far beyond public health. As state tasks, they are also notoriously challenging to democratic systems. Long-term investment by the state in efficient risk mitigation is constrained by electoral room for imposing short-term costs, salience and (un)certainty of effects and by levels of state capacity. In addition, potentially destabilizing risks often neither originate nor are they limited in scope of impact to a political unit with mitigation powers: neither a malign AI, nor climate change induced natural disasters, nor the next emerging virus with epidemic potency are likely to care much for nationalities. Therefore, game theory is probably also needed to map the challenges that governments face in their mitigation efforts.

Our panel will welcome contributions from all fields that offer insight into this question. From the practical (what state institutions predict risk?) to the philosophical (why and how much do we care about the end of humanity?), and from its micro-origins (what biases prevent us from thinking about disaster?) to its macro-implications (what should societies rationally speaking spend on low chance risk catastrophe mitigation?).