Behrooz Parhami of UCSB ECE

Abstract: The threat of runaway AI is all the rage these days and is being articulated by both scientists and lay people. We shouldn’t forget, however, that at least a dozen other extinction-level threats may terminate us before AI gets a chance to do it. I will present a list of such threats and quantify the likelihood, whenever possible, of these threats posing an extinction-level risk to the survival of humanity.

My top-ten list of threats, subjectively ordered from the most-serious to the least likely to cause human extinction, consists of asteroid impact, meeting a rogue black hole, a new global epidemic, giant solar flares, runaway artificial intelligence, alien invasion, nuclear apocalypse, ecosystem collapse, super-volcanic eruption, and gamma-ray bursts. I will discuss a few of these in some detail, while reviewing others in passing.

Biography:

Speaker's Bio: Behrooz Parhami (PhD, UCLA 1973) is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and former Associate Dean for Academic Personnel, College of Engineering, at University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches and does research in computer arithmetic, parallel processing, and dependable computing. A Life Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of IET and British Computer Society, and recipient of several other awards (including a most-cited paper award from J. Parallel & Distributed Computing), he has written six textbooks and more than 300 peer-reviewed technical papers. Professionally, he is an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor, serves on journal editorial boards and conference program committees, is passionate about puzzles, outreach efforts, & gender equity, and is active in technical consulting.

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