All of avturchin's Comments + Replies
Actually, I expected Gott equation to be mentioned here, as his Doomsday argument is a contemporary version of Laplace equation.
Also, qualified observers are not distributed linearly inside this period of time: from the idea of AI to creation of AI. If we assume that qualified observers are those who are interested in AI timing, than it look like that such people are much more numerous closer to the end of the period. As result, a random qualified observer should find oneself closer to the end of the period. If the number of qualified observers is growing exponentially, the median is just one doubling before the end. This makes AI timing prior closer to current events.
Thanks for great piece! One thing which may increase the extinction risk is that after the collapse, the remaining economy will be based not on agriculture and manufacturing, but on scavenging remains of previous civilisation. The problem with such economy is that it constantly shrinking and also does not help to learn useful skills, but instead helps local warlords arise and fight over leftovers. (Example: the economy of the post Soviet Union countries declined partly because it was more profitable to sell a factory for metal than to use it for manufactur...
...Toby Ord estimated in the Precipice a one in a thousand probability of
existential risk this century due to climate change, largely due to
locking in a moist greenhouse effect. We would estimate the
feasibility of maintaining industrial civilization (with eventual
colonization of space) in this scenario. The physical space on
Antarctica is adequate for industrial civilization, but alternative
foods produced on other continents would likely be required, such as
foods grown in air-conditioned greenhouses, single-cell protein
powered by renewable hydrogen, elec
I think that estimating fl should take into account the possibility of interstellar panspermia. Life appearing once could be disseminated through the whole galaxy in a few billion years via interstellar comets.
This creates strong observation selection effect: the galaxies where panspermia is possible will create billion times more observers than non-panspermia galaxies, and we are certainly in such a galaxy. So, fl is likely to be 1.
Interestingly, if no God exists, then all possible things should exist, and thus there is no end for our universe. To limit the number of actually existing things, we need some supernatural force, which allows only some worlds to exist, but which is not part of any of these worlds.
Easily available BCI may fuel a possible epidemic of wireheading, which may result in civilisational decline.
I read in Tweeter (so it is not very good source) that one of the problem of the 3GD is cavitation inside discharge tubes. Cavitation is happening when the speed of the waterflow is above 10 meter per second and water creates "vacuum bubbles" which later collapse and create shockwaves which are able to destroy even strongest materials. The discharge channels are inside the body of the dam as we can see on photos and if there will be a problem, they will affect the dam from inside without overtoping. Obviously, such channels could be closed but th...
If they evolve, say, from cats, they will share the same type-values: power, sex, love to children as all mammals. By token-values will be different as they will like not human children but kittens etc. An advance non-human civilization may be more similar to ours than we-now to Ancient Egyptian, as it would have more rational world models.
The article may reflect my immoralist view point that in almost all circumstances it is better to be alive than not.
Future torture is useless and thus unlikely. Let's look on humanity: as we mature, we tend to care more about other species that lived on Earth and of minority cultures. Torture for fun or for experiment is only for those who don't know how to get information or pleasure in other ways. It is unlikely that advance civilization will deliberately torture humans. Even if resurrected humans will not have full agency, they may have much ...
We could survive by preserving data about humanity (on the Moon or other places), which will be found by the next civilisation on Earth, and they will recreate humans (based on our DNA) and our culture.
May be they are also less detectable, so early warning systems will not catch them on early stages?
There is an idea of a multipandemic, that is several pandemics running simultaneously. This would significantly increase the probability of extinction.
Yes, natural catastrophes probabilities could be presented as frequentist probabilities, but some estimates are based on logical uncertainty of the claims like "AGI is possible".
Also, are these probabilities conditioned on "all possible prevention measures are taken"? If yes, they are final probabilities which can't be made lower.
Great database!
Your estimates are presented as numerical values similar to probabilities. Is it actually probabilities and if yes, are they frequentist probabilities or Bayesian? And more generally: How we can define the "probability of end of the world"?
For me, the most important intervention is to sleep on hard surface. I put 4 layers of yoga mat on my sofa, and it helps much.
Some internal air cleaner exist, including the ones with UV purification. My friend Denis Odinokov suggested to make a system to clean external air, which should consist of a tube with HEPA filter, ventilator and UV light source, which will create a positive air pressure inside the apartment. I think it is too difficult to hand-make at home. But it is another business opportunity of our time.
I heard about infection in HK via vent tubes.
If I were in a space with many people, I would like the windows will be open. At home, not.
What are the chances that the virus will flow from the apartment beneath mine into the mine one during ventilation?
I think that for viruses it will be difficult to become completely radiation resistant, as it would require complete overhaul of their makeup: thicker walls, stronger self-repair.
There is a new animal in the room: private pay-to-play clinical trials in third countries. In one case, people have to pay 1 million USD to enrol into an anti-aging clinical trial. Some of them could be scams. But it an option to take the risk and get the vaccine earlier for customers, and to get volunteers for the company.
EDITED: Andre Watson will be now live about private vaccine creation: https://www.facebook.com/events/516073069307382/
It is currently renamed as Porfirich which is joke name with some relation to a novel by Dostoyvsy. It was created by just one programmer, Michael Grankin.
It is just part of life here. Even when I was in the university 20 years ago, there was a student who hated one professor and he mined the whole university every Thursday. They found him eventually. Current mining is either related to war with Ukraine or to money blackmail.
I once created a causal map of all global risks starting from the beginning of evolution and accumulation of biases – and up to the end. But it included too many high-knotted elements which make the reading of the map difficult. Smaller causal maps with less than 10 elements are better adapted for human understanding.
Another good idea from the biosecurity literature is "distancing": that any bio threat increases the tendency of people tp distant from each other via quarantine, masks, less travel, and thus R0 will decline, hopely below 1.
Some Chinese may think that it was a bioweapon used against them and may want a retaliation. This is how nuclear-biological war could start.
Maybe because of anchoring effect: everyone on metaculus sees the median prediction before he makes the bet and doesn't want to be much different from the group.
It could have longer tail, but given high R0 large part of human population could be simultaneously ill (or self isolated) in March-April 2020.
What is you opinion, Dave, could this could put food production at risk?
It looks like it almost not affecting children; a person of older age should give himself a higher estimate of being affected.
Thanks. I always try to create a full list of possible solutions even if some seems very improbable.
I write it in English. 90 per cent my Russian friends could read English and also they probably know most of these news from different Russian media.
One such uncertainty is related to the conditional probability of x-risks and their relative order. Imagine that there is 90 per cent chance of biological x-risk before 2030, but if it doesn't happen, there is 90 per cent chance of AI-related x-risk event between 2030 and 2050.
In that case, total probability of survival extinction is 99 per cent, of which 90 is biological and only 9 is from AI. In other words, more remote risks are "reduced" in expected size by earlier risks which "overshadow" them.
Another point is that x-risks are by definition one-time events, so the frequentist probability is not applicable to them.
What EY is doing now? Is he coding, writing fiction or new book, working on math foundations, providing general leadership?
Not sure why the initials are only provided. For the sake of clarity to other readers, EY = Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I think that there are other cost-effective interventions in life extension, including research in geroprotectors combinations and brain plastination.
TAME study got needed funding from a private donor:
"After closing the final $40m of its required $75m budget with a donation from a private source, the first drug trial directly targeting aging is set to begin at the end of this year, lead researcher Dr Nir Barzilai has revealed."
If such message will be a description of a computer and a program for it, it is net bad. Think about malevolent AI, which anyone able to download from stars.
Such viral message is aimed on the self-replication and thus will eventually convert Earth into its next node which use all our resources to send copies of the message farther.
Simple darwinian logic implies that such viral messages should numerically dominate between all alien messages if any exists. I wrote an article, linked below to discuss the idea in details
If we know that there are aliens and they are sending some information, everybody will try to download their message. It is infohazard.
I also have an article which compare different ETI-related risk, now under review in JBIS.
Global Catastrophic Risks Connected with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
The latest version was published as proper article in 2018:
The Global Catastrophic Risks Connected with Possibility of Finding Alien AI During SETI
Alexey Turchin. Journal of British Interpanetary Society 71 (2):71-79 (2018)
There is a small probability that we are very wrong about climate sensivity and only in this case climate change is an existential risk. The reason for this is not in the climate science, but in the anthropic principle: if our climate is very fragile to the runaway global warming, we can't observe it, as we find ourselves only on planets where it didn't happen.
To fight runaway global warming we need different type of geo-engineering then for the ordinary climate management, as it should be able to provide quicker results for larger climate change...
Surely, there are lager effect sizes there, but they need much more testing to prove the safety and such testing is the most expensive part of any trials. There is a few already safe intervention which could help to extend life, that is, besides metformin, green tee and vitamin D.
Even as a trillion dollar project, fighting aging could be still cost-effective, after we divide the benefit for 10 billion people.
If we speaking on de novo therapies, current price of just one drug development is close to 10 billions, and comprehensive aging therapy like SENS s...
The main question as I see: is current spending of 1 billion-a-year on aging enough to delay aging for 10 years? Aging is a problem of (hyper)exponentially increasing complexity with time. There are probably a few interventions which could give 1-3 years of expected life extension (and aging delay): metformin, vitamin D and green tea, and proper testing of them could cost as few as tens millions of dollars as in proposed TAME study of metformin. This (+chance to survive for other life extending technologies) means much higher cost-effectiveness of such sma...
In fact, I tried also to explore this idea - which I find crucial - in my Russian book "Structure of global catastrophe", but my attempts to translate into English didn't work well, so I now slowly convert its content in the articles.
I would add an important link on the A Singular Chain of Events by Tonn and MacGregor, as well as work of Seth Baum on double catastrophes. The idea of "Peak everything" about simultaneous depletion of all natural resources also belong here, but should be combined with idea of Singularity as idea of a...
Theoretical reasons for Doomsday weapon was laid by Herman Khan in "On Thermonuclear war". I scanned related chapter here: https://www.scribd.com/document/16563514/Herman-Khan-On-Doomsday-machine
The main idea is that it is ideal defence weapon, as no body will ever attack a country owning such a device.
The idea of attacking the Yellowstone is discussed very often in Russian blogosphere (like here https://izborskiy-club.livejournal.com/310579.html), and interest to the geophysical weapons was strong in the Soviet Union (details here: http://nvo.n...
"Normal" nuclear war could be only only a first stage of multistage collapse. However, there are some ideas, how to use exiting nuclear stockpiles to cause more damage and trigger a larger global catastrophe - one is most discussed is nuking a supervolcano, but there are others. In Russian sources is a common place that retaliation attack on US may include attack on the Yellowstone, but I don't know if it is a part of the official doctrine.
Future nuclear war could be using even more destructive weapons (which may exist secretly now). Teller has been working on 10 gigaton bomb. Russians now making Poseidon large torpedo system which will be probably equipped with 100 Mt cobalt bombs.
"Normal" global warming is not x-risk, but possible heavy tail connected with something unknown could be. For example, the observed stability of our climate may be just an "anthropic shadow", and, in fact, climate transition to the next hotter meta-stable condition is long overdue, and could be triggered by small human actions.
The next meta-stable state may be with median temperature 57C according to the article https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4748134/ ("The climate instability is caused by a positive cloud feedback a...
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