Dear Readers,
It is a pleasure to share with you an update from myself and the team at the OI for the eventful year of 2024! Our first full year in operation as a registered charity was action packed, following our registration in September 2023. During 2024 we tripled our team size from 4 to 12, working with a fantastic range of researchers and operations personnel, many of them volunteers, across 4 continents. Their sterling work allowed us to:
Deliver a groundbreaking horizon scan in dramatic speed (A Horizon Scan of Global Catastrophic Risks)
Collaborate with fellow travellers such as ALLFED on work that led to a scientific paper Resilience Reconsidered
Develop an overarching project to build on our work on the above further, the Global Resilient Anticipatory Infrastructure Network (GRAIN)
Plan how to deploy the Odyssean Process to AI governance
Develop a curriculum for training professionals and engaging community building around paradigms we focus on
Launch a blog series and begin our first more extensive media engagement
We built up to these successes after delivering our first foundational work and flagship output, the White Paper ‘The Odyssean Process’ in 2023, which serves as a mission statement and provides the cornerstone of an ambitious research and advocacy agenda. This distilled our vision to radically improve the epistemic and democratic quality of decision making around systemic, complex, and catastrophic risks.
Eyes on the Horizon
This year we began in earnest testing and scaling the first component of the Odyssean Process, with a horizon scan on global catastrophic risks. Specifically, we focused on new and neglected tipping points with the potential to cascade globally.
Horizon scans serve as the foundation of the Odyssean Process, as they are a tested methodology to elicit expert insights on emerging trends, while simultaneously reducing cognitive bias and groupthink of participants. We worked with Professor William J. Sutherland of Cambridge University, an annual convener of conservation horizon scans. His work here, as a successful predictor of trends in conservation years before their mainstreaming in media, such as the risks around microplastics, demonstrated we could discover crucial aspects for research and policy through this foresight technique.
We chose the challenging research topic of tipping points because the urgency of prioritising how to avoid them was matched only by their relative neglect. For example, in climate change modelling, some of the largest disruptions to our essential systems could occur when key thresholds are crossed. We posited that in other global catastrophic risks, lacking awareness about similar tipping points could prove incredibly costly if not addressed promptly. By definition, these tipping points are difficult to recover from; we would be locked into millennia of catastrophe, and as such their impacts are too great to continue to collectively ignore. Despite this, their study remained challenging, perhaps inherently so as they are so bound up with unknown unknowns that catalyse these critical thresholds.
We saw this exercise as highly impactful for researchers and policymakers to build further resilience through, as a means of rigorously prioritising causes. It also dovetails with our proposed future work, as the aim of the Odyssean Process’ mutually reinforcing components is to make certain problems formerly intractable (with legacy tools, blunt approaches, and fatalistic conservatism) possible – and even probable – to solve. By first identifying such risks from the expertise of leading researchers in relevant disciplines, we then work to dissolve deadlock around solutions for them with exploratory modelling, which aims to identify pareto-optimal interventions which can be coproduced with the public.
Not only was this project conceptually daunting, it was also operationally so. As a young organisation with a remit that extends beyond the usual in existential risk studies (aiming, as we do, for start to finish enhancements of the policymaking pipeline) our resourcing was limited. Thankfully, the autumn of 2023 had seen my attendance of the Epistea Residency in Prague, allowing me to work diligently on our White Paper and give a talk on it. One of the conveners of Epistea, Jan Kulveit, provided critical funding from the Alignment of Complex Systems Research Group; this was then matched with logistical support from Wytham Abbey, where we hosted our concluding workshop as one of their very last events before they closed.
With the Abbey’s forthcoming closure limiting our concluding workshop to March 2024, we were left with a record breaking feat to pull off. Several academic advisors experienced with horizon scanning informed us that an ideal timeline for horizon scans is 4-6 months from first invitation to final workshop. In our case, we had at best 3. Moreover, as attested at the time, but which we had not yet realised, this was to be the world’s first global catastrophic risk horizon scan, compounded in complexity by an especially challenging transdisciplinary problem. We would have to do groundbreaking work under budget, and faster than normal. Nothing beats a new challenge to spur action; the urgency reminded us that when the going gets tough, the tough get going!
In January we onboarded 32 experts across several fields relevant to global catastrophic risks to answer with emerging issues ‘what are some new or neglected tipping points with a potential to cascade globally, related to civilisational risks’. These experts then anonymously submitted 2-5 issues each, which were scored anonymously by the group in rounds of voting and further research, starting with 96, reducing them to 37, and then deliberating in the workshop until we had a final set of 15 issues.
Our persistence and pace allowed us to develop novel innovations for scoring and ranking the issues, ensuring that we went beyond existing horizon scan practice to capture data that was as multidimensional as possible. Rather than scoring solely for relevance to the question and whether participants had heard of the issues before, we added a neglectedness score to see whether they believed, regardless of novelty to them personally, whether wider society was still acting with insufficient resolve or concentration to mitigate the issues.
The horizon scan was a resounding success, with our ongoing peer review with One Earth available to read here. In our conclusion we specified future work, including:
Systems mapping of the issues identified, for exploratory modelling to identify pareto-optimal interventions, and
Future democratic deliberation through any number of citizen assemblies addressing the specific systemic risks. Therefore, testing and scaling phases 2 and 3 of the Odyssean Process are objectives for our work in 2025 (as our deploying the Odyssean Process for AI exemplifies below)
Thinking along the GRAIN
2024 also saw further academic analysis on neglected factors for GCRs. Our other paper undergoing peer review with the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, Resilience Reconsidered, developed our preliminary thinking on supply chain vulnerability at the global level and how to cultivate resilience to it. We conducted a literature review of the sparse field around trade recovery following reduced sunlight conditions, such as those we might face after a nuclear war, asteroid impact, or volcanic eruptions. Building on the excellent work our frequent collaborators ALLFED undertake, we focused on how food and other essential commodities might be protected should trade chokepoints be impacted.
This, much neglected by existing research, has informed our upcoming horizon scan on the risks and solutions to the second order effects of a nuclear exchange, forthcoming in 2025 with funding from Longview. It also aligned nicely with several of the food systems insecurity and trade failure issues identified in our broader GCR horizon scan.
The thrust of this work sat with a broader research stream, which saw us cultivate our Global Resilient Anticipatory Infrastructure Network (GRAIN) initiative further. Launched late in 2023, GRAIN emerged from our contact with civil services and elected officials in Asia and Europe. GRAIN aims to identify areas where trade and industrial policy, scientific diplomacy, and other multilateral collaborations can be used to increase global adaptive capacity. Beyond the academic track, we are aiming for practical industry and policy recommendations. We are thus undertaking a typology, case study selection, and literature review on the components of resilience across material and non-material dimensions for 2025. This is critical as there may be several economic and policy opportunities laying dormant, to align industrial policy and resilience building with nearer term policy objectives, allowing us to kill two birds with one stone if effectively deployed to increase the tractability of collaboration globally.
Additional Highlights
For our more prospective work, we also developed a detailed proposal for deploying the Odyssean Process on AI, which we are exploring launching in 2025 and recording with a documentary. As preparation, we’ve identified approximately 90 specific questions such an eventual deliberation would want to tackle, to again provide plentiful options for policymaking, and tools for exploring and deciding which to prioritise, depending on where opportunities to intervene arise. We already have two such scoped opportunities with municipal governments in the United States, and intend to remain agile regarding other local and national governments that may want to improve their regulations here, drawing on the strongest research and the most refined democratic processes. Watch this space for further updates next year!
As a final deliverable, we also produced a curriculum as an introduction to the paradigms, concepts, and transdisciplinary approaches that inform our work. Our intention here is both to provide a primer for interested audiences, and also a set of sessions that can engender greater familiarity and applicability of our methodologies for enhanced decision making. We intend to conduct a series of workshops and seminars in 2025 to extend this knowledge and practice base into conferences, networks of professionals and researchers, and policy making environments - both as a means to communicate our work, and iteratively improve and learn from practitioners and experts, much as the Odyssean Process has aimed to do also.
This year also saw burgeoning media, civil service, and parliamentary engagements. These were initiated after we distilled the Odyssean Process White Paper into a 3 page policy brief in February. From outreach using this, we met with the UK Shadow Minister for Democracy at the time, MP Florence Eshalomi, advising on citizen assembly potentials for restoring institutional capacity and public trust, the Department of Business and Trader around trade resilience, and the Taiwanese government regarding their record of citizen engagement under the outgoing Minister Audrey Tang. We also were consulted in the design stages of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund citizen assembly, launching in early 2025, regarding scoping around the Odyssean Process’ potential for large, future-generation geared decision making.
As part of our wider media engagement, we also scored a series of firsts. In the summer we launched this blog series, which has included pieces on how the GRAIN initiative corresponds to, and can learn from, the salutary work of the Small Island States Resilience Initiative; another by Bilal Asghar on the Odyssean Process’ relevance for three areas democracies have struggled with of late; and a third piece by Jacob Haimes on the use of the term “emergence” with respect to AI systems.
As part of wider outreach and networking, our personnel attended numerous conferences, ranging from EA Global London, where we presented our preliminary findings from the horizon scan at a small pop up event for nuclear risks, with attendance also at NeurIPS and the DMDU Annual Conference. We intend to continue to do so throughout 2025 to encourage further collaboration and exposure of our work to relevant audiences.
Finally, I was interviewed as lead author of our horizon scan and CEO of the Institute on Frekvenca X (Frequency X), a science show on Slovenian Radio. I discussed a number of questions including on how we conduct our research, what effective futures work is, and challenges in addressing interconnected risks at large.
Reflections on a Turbulent Year
In reflecting on 2024, I can say with satisfaction that we really delivered on the conceptual foundations we laid in 2023, demonstrating a knack for delivering ambitious work on tight budgets. That said, resourcing remains challenging. Our remit is a transdisciplinary, paradigm shifting effort to evolve democratic decision making so that it truly incorporates existing scientific best practices, with an explicit focus on open access and open source principles. This is in large part because we see vested interests, and poor media representation of catastrophic risks as inhibiting our chances of success. As such, the use of the Odyssean Process is calibrated to give the general public the strongest tools possible to break free from the stultifying and distracting cycles of short termism, corporate power pursuing profit at all costs, and mixtures of indifference, ignorance, and misdirection exacerbating our abilities to change course.
Our achievements this year required deft management and diligent work by all team members, and has positioned us with a strong body of work to develop further in 2025. The inherent difficulties and scope of addressing such challenges mean that in order to deliver on our objectives, we will need stronger funding from philanthropic donors who understand the crucial interplay of ambition, imagination, and rigour. They will need to be bold thinkers who acknowledge that in this largest election year yet, certain norms have been overturned. This means much is at stake as we progress through the 2020s, with parties and politicians who deny that we face many of the challenges identified in our work storming to power on the frustrations of a public whose fears and hopes have been stoked and neglected respectively by the aforementioned trends in the media, economy, and politics. It will not be easy to rectify some of the time wasted in areas such as climate policy, but it is exactly this reason why the Odyssean Institute was founded in the first place; to approach the boldest questions of our shared destiny with the utmost quality of explication, exploration, and ambition for our own collective intelligence and ability to flourish under the most testing conditions.
For example, two of the projects outlined here: GRAIN, and testing the Odyssean Process, constitute the two prongs of our research trident. 2024 also saw us recruit for our third prong, wellbeing and long term alternative economic theory, to furnish a look at measuring and tracking what really matters in the face of possible catastrophe, so we do not uncritically reproduce self-terminating logics from economics. This more speculative, qualitative agenda (which has been supported with some crucial funding by the Dag Strand Nielsen & Family Foundation) will engage wider work, such as that from doughnut economics, to enrich engaging citizens around economic development that centre decent standards of living rather than extractivist logics.
There will be more on this, and our aforementioned maturing project plans, in a research agenda for 2025 forthcoming early next year. Some previews we can share include:
A horizon & solution scan we are planning around resilience to nuclear exchanges, with overlapping relevance to reduced sunlight conditions generally
A seminar at the RAND Corporation on the Odyssean Process and its implications for existential risk and democratic practice
A citizen assembly on AI governance, with an accompanying documentary. We aim here to encourage a broader dialogue with the cultural and political moment we face currently in order to effectively regulate the transformative technology at a critical moment of societal integration
A report distilling the typologies, case studies, and opportunities for intervention and development of global adaptive capacity, as a flagship paper for the GRAIN initiative
We’re excited to invite you all to follow our work, share it amongst friends and colleagues, and join us either as researchers or indeed as patrons through either direct donations, or by contacting us for collaborative work proposals.
Comments