MichaelHoward comments on Excuse me, would you like to take a survey? - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Yvain 26 April 2009 09:23PM

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Comment author: MichaelHoward 26 April 2009 11:05:53PM 5 points [-]

interesting questions that you want asked... post each as a separate comment

Select the Existential Risk you judge most likely to occur this century?

  • Nuclear holocaust
  • Badly programmed superintelligence
  • Genetically engineered biological agent
  • Accidental misuse of nanotechnology (“gray goo”)
  • Environmental catastrophe (eg runaway global warming)
  • etc
Comment author: MichaelBishop 27 April 2009 04:36:18AM 2 points [-]

Why not ask for probabilities for each, and confidence intervals as well?

Comment author: CannibalSmith 27 April 2009 02:26:06PM -1 points [-]

You must also ask country of residence for this to be valid.

Comment author: hirvinen 27 April 2009 03:10:37PM 1 point [-]

I think we mean here by existential risks something alone the lines of, in Bostrom's words " - - either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or drastically and permanently curtail its potential", making countries irrelevant.

Comment author: CannibalSmith 27 April 2009 07:21:15PM 0 points [-]

Oops, I misread "century" as "country".

Comment author: hirvinen 27 April 2009 03:57:01AM 0 points [-]

Related, but different: Which of these world-saving causes should receive most attention? (Maybe place these in order.)

  • Avoiding nuclear war
  • Create a Friendly AI, including prevention of creating AIs you don't think are Friendly
  • Create AI, no need to be Friendly.
  • Prevent creation of AIs until humans are a lot smarter
  • Improve human cognition(should this include uploading capabilities?)
  • Defense against biological agents
  • Delay nanotechnology development until we have sufficiently powerful AIs to set up defenses against gray goo
  • Creation and deployment of anti- gray goo nanotechnology
  • Avoiding environmental hazards
  • Space colonization
  • Fighting diseases
  • Fighting aging
  • something else?
Comment author: Jack 27 April 2009 05:17:48AM 0 points [-]

"Most attention" is ambiguous, particularly when some of the options are phrased as proactive and others reactive/preventative. Do you man funding? Public awareness? Plus there some issues might be incredibly important but require relatively little "attention" to solve while others might be less important but take a lot more resources to solve. I wouldn't know how to answer this question accept to say I don't think any effort should be spent on creating and deploying anti- grey goo nanotech.

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