Humanity is living through an unprecedented confluence of emerging, accelerating, and compounding crises - threatening perhaps even extinction. Yet we are also equipped with bold and proven means to confront them.
The risks are great but the rewards of redressing them are equally vast. In averting existential risks, we can also fundamentally transform our social, institutional, and conceptual inheritance for the better.
As much as this calls for boldness, it also requires focus. Ours is set on the following:
Developing Wise Institutions
The Odyssean Institute empowers people and institutions to better navigate complex problems during times of crisis. Our solution, the Odyssean Process, blends expert knowledge, computational foresight and participatory decision making. This novel combination deepens existing institutional capacity, harnessing collective intelligence to address global risks - in a legitimate and effective manner.
To avoid sleepwalking into catastrophe and instead chart hopeful and flourishing futures, our work addresses the neglected need for new incentives and structures to collectively decide better, together.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Palaeolithic emotions, mediaeval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
E.O. Wilson
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
T.S Eliot
Anticipating Global Resilience
Deferring resilience until solutions and mitigations have been exhausted is not viable. The Odyssean Institute connects disciplines, countries, and sectors through initiatives like GRAIN to identify and reinforce critical nodes in global systems where adaptation and resilience are most needed – not only to survive systemic shocks, but to bounce back from them stronger.
Resilience and adaptation measures must not be burdens that only kick in during crises, but endeavours that develop and refine systems’ robustness to the benefit of all parties, even under stable conditions.
Nurturing Flourishing & Wellbeing
The Odyssean Institute seeks to foster human flourishing, beyond mere survival. For that, we draw on insights beyond traditional approaches to economics and long term planning. For stable societies and a sustainable future for people and planet, our efforts integrate conceptions of development that centre holistic wellbeing over flattening metrics such as GDP.
We mean flourishing in a collective as well as individual sense. Massive wealth inequality, social stasis, and the structures that permit these, risk collapse as much as ecological or technological risks. They deserve our focus, too.
"Those who plant trees, knowing that only others will enjoy the shade, are public benefactors."
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Developing Wise Institutions
Democracy has already been disrupted. The means to hack it reside in the hands of vested interests, oligarchs, and intelligence agencies. It risks collapse if we treat it complacently, and both directly as a loss of living standards and freedoms and indirectly (for authoritarianism’s degradation of responsive policymaking) this would be a disaster.
We must move quickly and mend things. For democracy and associated high quality public policy to persist, it must evolve. At the OI we believe deliberative democracy, for example through citizen assemblies, can create sophisticated, popular, and robust policies to address our greatest challenges. This is doubly so if combined with effective means for combining scientific knowledge, and our computable abilities, to explore uncertainties rigorously.
Triggering social tipping points of a sustainable kind are how we move away from crossing tipping points that irreversibly trap us into dangerous paths. With the right methods, we can move self-terminating, vicious cycles into virtuous ones. Tracking how quickly the Odyssean Process can be undertaken, based on its principal components, suggests major legislative gains can be made even for very short-termist AI timelines, or imminent climate tipping points. It also strengthens our ability to decide collectively on better futures, as the Yahaba Town example illustrates.
The Odyssean Process we have designed innovatively combines best practices from three key areas for public policy:
Firstly, by eliciting experts’ insights systematically through horizon scanning, several sciences can be brought together pragmatically in the problem identification phase of policy making.
Secondly, scenario simulations at scale through decision making under deep uncertainty (DMDU) allow many possible worlds to be mapped, to discover where stakeholder’s preferences for how to navigate them overlap, for robustness in the solution identification phase.
Finally, citizen assemblies allow these tools to enrich the public’s ability to reason about long term, exponential, and complex threats - and their inverse opportunities. This enables legislative drafting and advocacy to be improved with stronger deliberation, as a broad sample of collective intelligence engaged by those with skin in the game is used; ensuring the breadth of public reason is not squandered. This fundamentally addresses the risks of regulatory capture, manipulation by vested interests, and the failures of legacy media to address these challenges appropriately, without sensation or indifference.
In sum, with this work we aim to develop wiser institutions for current and future generations.
Anticipating Global Resilience
We w​elcome a growing appreciation for the irreducible interconnections at systemic levels that amplify intercausal risk, itself contributing to compound, interconnected, interacting, and cascade risks.
Through complexity modelling, agent based, and systems dynamical modelling, we intend to execute decision making under deep uncertainty, fostering greater integration of the natural and social sciences for enhanced understanding of solutions.
This approach is further informed by historical data and current trends within biophysical, informational, and multiscale political (regional, national, and global) trends. We believe in particular with subpar policy responses to climate change, collapse risk deserves far greater attention in an expansive framework for GCR.
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The risk of astronomical suffering only increases as technological potency and political failures accumulate; escalating conflict dynamics constitute under-explored components of avoiding collapse.
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A combination of developing existential and deliberative mechanisms will be explored in the interests of diffusing the 'hidden variables' behind much of malevolent actors' and perverse incentives, with all their incumbent second order impacts on Civilisational Risk.
Nurturing Flourishing & Wellbeing
Focusing on the long term future may not be the only framework for mitigating X-risk and GCR, but it is a vital lens, especially when working on neglected "broad approaches" that appear robust.
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Value lock-in is a major risk in the long run, with our era arguably having as crucial a position as the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment did on the nascent principles and institutions of the modern era.
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Accordingly, we emphasise buttressing what Nick Beckstead has outlined as "coordination, capability, motives, and information" capacities today are crucial. Besides IIDM above, we also identify open science and meta-research as associated reforms within the 'Odyssean democratic' framework, as enormous amounts of knowledge and technological development may be unduly constrained by publishing houses today.