Existential Risks
The Luby Lab seeks to advance discussion of existential threats, support research on global catastrophic risks, and explore tractable pathways for students and researchers to reduce these risks.
The Luby Lab partners with the Stanford Existential Risks Initiatives (SERI), who seeks to host and promote academic scholarship and cross-research with the goal of preventing existential risks, which include nuclear war, pandemics, bioterrorism, and other threats related in advances in biotechnology, catastrophic accidents/misuse, and effects of extreme climate change and environmental degradation. Learn more about SERI's work here:
Select Publications
2025
Goldberg et al. 2025, Adolescent psychological health, temporal discounting, and climate distress under increased flood exposure in Bangladesh: a mixed-methods cross-sectional study
Zimmer 2025, The Power to Kill Life Itself: Michel Foucault, Biopolitics, and the Political Challenge of Human Extinction
Wild et al. 2025, Synthesizing the Evidence Base to Enhance Coordination between Humanitarian Mine Action and Emergency Care for Casualties of Explosive Ordnance and Explosive Weapons: A Scoping Review
2024
Lamparth & Reuel. 2024, Analyzing And Editing Inner Mechanisms of Backdoored Language Models
Rivera et al. 2024, Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making
Undheim 2024, An interdisciplinary review of systemic risk factors leading up to existential risks
Lamparth & Schneider. 2024, Why the Military Can’t Trust AI
Ermanni 2024, Navigating the Complexities of Existential Risk: Insights from the 2023 Stanford Existential Risks Conference
Stanford University 2024, Proceedings of the 2024 SERI Conference
Undheim 2024, Dyadic risk mechanisms–a nomenclature for 36 proto-cascading effects determining humanity’s future
Undheim 2024, In search of better methods for the longitudinal assessment of tech-derived X-risks: How five leading scenario planning efforts can help
Undheim & Ahmad 2024, Quantitative scenarios for cascading risks in AI, climate, synthetic bio, and financial markets by 2075
Undheim 2024, The whack-a-mole governance challenge for AI-enabled synthetic biology: literature review and emerging frameworks
Zimmer & Rodehau-Noack. 2024, Today’s AI threat: More like nuclear winter than nuclear war
Photo Credit: Hacer Keles