The lesson of the potato famine was that crops should be more, rather than less, diverse. The potatoes that were in cultivation didn't have enough genetic variation which is why the the disease had such a huge impact. But if it's true of crops... then it's also true of people. People should be more genetically diverse. This way a new pathogen can't kill all of us. Although I have no idea how you'd practically ensure greater human diversity!!?? History might refer to you as the opposite of Hitler.
Regarding the danger of AI... if greater diversity is better for crops and humans... then it's also better for robots as well. We'll give more resources to the most beneficial robots. Evil robots won't have a leg to stand on.
And war can be eliminated by tax choice.
Interesting fact is that humans are one of less diversed species because our population passed recently through bottle neck and after it experienced rapid growth. Each chimp is more different from any other chimp than any human between each other. This means that we are prone to large pandemic. We are almost clones. So some genetic experiments in embryos may improve situation, but better to invest in the bio safety.
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