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
Liquidity problems are an issue but it may have been partially solved by first, paying normal interest on deposits to avoid opportunity cost issues, and second by market makers like Hanson's LMSR. In particular, people can subsidize the market-maker, paying to get trading activity and hence accuracy.
It's not the liquidity problems I'm worried about, but rather the signal-to-noise ratio.
Assume that the correct underlying probability is, say, 0.5% and so you should expect 0.5% of the participants to bet on the "the end is nigh!" side. However you also have a noise level -- say 3% of your participants are looking for teh lulz or believe that a correct bet will get them front-row Rapture seats (or vice versa). Given this noise floor you will be unable to extract the signal from the prediction market if the event has a sufficiently low probability.