= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChristianKl comments on US default as a risk to mitigate - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (120)
There not much emotion in the lines I wrote. You are the person who's emotional because of some perceived danger to yourself.
There no wishful thinking behind the notion that a lot of scientific research is dangerous. I'm in favor of scientific research because without it I will certainly die in the next hundred years. On the other hand the idea that scientific research reduces existential is naive.
Yudkowsky was working on building AGI when he got the insight that the likely outcome of building an AGI is that the AGI goes bad and kills everyone. Then he grew up and thought about whether persuing that problem is the right thing to do.
There are way to many scientists who just naively want to believe that they are doing good, when they are endangering humanity. The idea that everyone is on the same time when it comes to reducing X-risks is wishful thinking.
Bottom line, MIRI and similar projects only exist in countries rich enough to have the time and resources to devote to future risks. If you believe that MIRI reduces existential risks, then something that is a risk to MIRI is itself an existential risk to some extent.
If there no one rich enough to engage in AGI research, you don't need MIRI to prevent existential risk.
Doesn't this extend to a generalized argument against technological advancement, since any of it might cause existential risks?
Not necessarily. Couldn't one argue that technological advancement is neutral? It'd be hard for farmers to detect and blow up incoming asteroids, for example.
Don't think "neutral" is the right word, it's more like technological progress has two consequences pushing in different directions. On the one hand, tech makes humanity better equipped to deal with existential risk that is there regardless (e.g. asteroids). On the other hand, tech creates new kinds of existential risk (e.g. grey goo). Which effect is stronger/more important is debatable.
Yes, it does. If the main thing you care about is existential risk than getting rid of all technological advancement is benefitial.
The average technological advance raises existential risk. Pushing technology for it's own sake in the hope that it solve existential risk doesn't make sense.
Do you mean at the current level of technology or do you mean at all times everywhere?
For example our ancestors were nearly wiped out by an ice age...
I think if I sample technology the average technology got developed in the 20st or 21st century.
Which ice age do you mean? The last one? What evidence do you have for that claim?
See e.g. this or this.
I believe the most likely existential risk is a Malthusian Crunch.
Unlike many of the optimistic transhumanists out there, I believe that we are in a constant race between technology opening up new resources (or more efficient use of existing ones) and runaway population growth (which contributes to an astonishing array of seemingly unrelated world problems). Whenever technology starts to lose you have overshoot followed by civilizational collapse.
We have only a limited number of such collapse cycles before we exhaust whatever the rate limiting resources turn out to be and permanently foreclose on expanding beyond Earth and having any sort of shot at being the species that beats The Great Filter.
Moreover, a collapse happening pretty much guarantees that anybody who is cryosuspended before that time will permanently and irrevokably die with no hope of reprieve.
Empirically, in reality, there is no runaway population growth.
Empirically, what level of population growth would it take for you to consider it runaway?
Population growth rates are not steady-state. They are a function of many things, notably the prevalent wealth and education (which tend to go together) in a society. So far all human societies which reached a certain level of wealth sharply curtailed their growth rates and in many cases actually sent them into negatives.
...and this wealth is possible because of technological growth. We might make the world wealthy enough fast enough to bring population far enough down to be sustainable, but it still amounts to a race between technology and population growth, which was my original point: invent or die
Population growth is primarily a problem in Africa. With present technology it can mean genocide in Africa. Civilizational collapse in Africa is a humanitarian tradgedy but it shouldn't bring down Europe, the Americas or China.
Or, a briefer version of the below:
Europe, the Americas, and China are all part of the same global economy. They bid for the same collection of fixed resources and space. They share the same commons and the same tragedy of the commons. It's the same way that just because you're not directly linked to the government doesn't mean that you won't be affected by it collapsing, but on a global scale.
Okay, so I'll try to learn from recent previous experience and not flame.
Deep breath.
Very partial list of how population growth can bring down Europe, the Americas, China, and everyplace else:
Waves of refugees straining the local infrastructure past the breaking point.
Demand for petroleum rising faster than the rate of new oil reserves being discovered and faster than alternative technologies can be developed and brought to market on a sufficient scale.
Ditto for accessible deposits of some metals.
Pollution.
Pandemics spreading from regions of high population density to everywhere.
Deforestation.
Global warming and sea level rise.
Competition for resources leading to wars.
Environmentalists like to view this as our species being irresponsible. They're not seeing the big picture. At any given level of resources and technology, there is a finite carrying capacity. If we exceed that carrying capacity, we will have a die-off soon after no matter how "responsible" we are. If there were only a few million of us on the planet we could spend our days hunting endangered species from 1 mile-per-gallon SUVs that run on coal and melted plastic and still be okay.
It's not easy to migrate away from Africa and it's a matter of political willingness to accept "waves of refugees". The highest demand of petroleum and metals doesn't come from those place with high population growth. A US citizen ten times the amount of energy as a nigerian. And Nigeria is a country that uses a lot of energy for an African nation because it has oil.
A Amercian house cat consumes produces more CO_2 than some Africans.
There no reason that everyone has to die.
But in reflection I grant you that developing alternative energy technology might reduce some risks.
But being responsible can mean using only a tenth as much energy which means you could have ten times as many people.
When it comes to the issue of overpopulation we face the trend that birth rates go down. The problem moves in the right direction. As far as current trends go it's unlikely that population will double.
Well, it's happening in Europe already. The US is having immigration issues of its own as well.
As I said to Lumifer, birth rates are going down because of wealth, which is driven by technology. As you pointed out, though:
...wealth is also accompanied by increased resource demand which may cancel out the time that diminished population growth buys us.
By the way, the emphasis on Africa is misplaced. It might, as a continent, have the highest growth rates, but most populated countries are outside of Africa, and most of them have grown by more than 20% between 1990 and 2010.
That's all pretty standard scaremongering that has been making the rounds since early 1970s. There were no signs it's likely to happen then and there are no signs it's likely to happen now.
What would be the signs that we would be observing if it were likely to happen?