Stanford Existential Risks Initiative Symposium 2026: Emerging Technologies & Existential Risk @CISACatStanford

Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago

0:00 Welcome Remarks
10:55 Emerging Technology and Existential Risks
59:30 The Changing Nature of WMD Threats
1:37:36 AI and Geopolitics
2:25:58 Technology, Energy, and the Environment
3:02:11 The Politics and Economics of Biodefense
3:35:27 Practical Solutions to Biodefense
4:19:19 Large Scale Societal Impacts of AI
5:12:19 Public Perception on Strategic Risks: Where do we go from here?

The 2026 Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI) Symposium, titled Emerging Technologies and Existential Risk, will explore the risks from emerging technologies, with a particular attention to governance and technological solutions. The event will bring together leading experts and researchers from across the Bay Area who specialize in a range of global risks, including artificial intelligence, climate change, biosecurity, and nuclear threats.

This symposium will provide an interdisciplinary platform for participants to engage in discussions around the policies and solutions needed to address these large-scale, existential risks. Attendees will gain insights from diverse perspectives as they collaborate to find innovative approaches to safeguard our future.

Stanford Existential Risks Initiative Symposium 2026: Emerging Technologies & Existential Risk

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$Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency Speaker: Terrence Peterson Can efforts to counter a revolution also be revolutionary? The Algerian War fractured the French Empire, destroyed the legitimacy of colonial rule, and helped launch the Third Worldist movement for the liberation of the Global South. In this discussion of his new book, Terrence G. Peterson highlights how the conflict also quietly helped to transform the nature of modern warfare. The French war effort was never defined solely by repression. As this talk details, it also sought to fashion new forms of surveillance and social control that could capture the loyalty of Algerians and transform Algerian society. Hygiene and medical aid efforts, youth sports and education programs, and psychological warfare campaigns all attempted to remake Algerian social structures and bind them more closely to the French state. In tracing the emergence of such programs, Peterson reframes the French war effort as a radical project of armed social reform that sought not to preserve colonial rule unchanged, but to revolutionize it in order to preserve it against the global challenges of decolonization. As Peterson will make clear, French officers efforts to transform warfare into an exercise in social engineering not only shaped how the Algerian War unfolded from its earliest months, but also helped to forge a paradigm of warfare that dominated strategic thinking during the Cold War and after: counterinsurgency.$

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