Let’s do an experiment in "reverse crowdfunding”. I will pay 50 USD to anyone who can suggest a new way of X-risk prevention that is not already mentioned in this roadmap. Post your ideas as a comment to this post.
Should more than one person have the same idea, the award will be made to the person who posted it first.
The idea must be endorsed by me and included in the roadmap in order to qualify, and it must be new, rational and consistent with modern scientific data.
I may include you as a co-author in the roadmap (if you agree).
The roadmap is distributed under an open license GNU.
Payment will be made by PayPal. The total amount of the prize fund is 500 USD (total 10 prizes).
The competition is open until the end of 2015.
The roadmap can be downloaded as a pdf from:
UPDATE: I uploaded new version of the map with changes marked in blue.
http://immortality-roadmap.com/globriskeng.pdf
Email: alexei.turchin@gmail.com
Is A3 meant to have connecting links horizontal through it's path?
Another bad idea: build a simulation-world to live in so that we don't actually have to worry about real-world risks. (disadvantage - is possibly an X-risk itself)
It kinda depends on which x-risk you are trying to cover...
For example - funding technologies that improve the safety or efficiency of nuclear use might mean that any use is a lot more harmless. Or develop ways to clean up nuclear mess; or mitigate the decay of nuclear radiation (i.e. a way to gather nuclear radioactive dust)
Encouraging people to start small bio-hack groups around the world could improve the biotechnology understanding of the public to the point where no one accidentally creates a bio-technology hazard. Developing better guidance on safe biotechnology processes and exactly why its safe this way and not otherwise... effectively "raising the sanity waterline" but specific to the area of biotechnology risks.
(I suggest that maybe you want to offer to take free suggestions before you pay people - at least that might save you some dollars)
I'm all for biohazard awareness groups, and even most forms of BioHacking at local HackerSpaces or wherever else. However, I never want to see potentially dangerous forms of BioTech become decentralized. Centralized sources are easy to monitor and control. If anyone can potentially make an engineered pandemic in their garage, then no amount of education will ... (read more)