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turchin comments on What we could learn from the frequency of near-misses in the field of global risks (Happy Bassett-Bordne day!) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (9)
I don't really buy it. The world is changing too fast. Things are way different now than they were in the 50s, so I don't think the statistics from then really mean much anymore.
In another 50 years what will the landscape look like? who knows? Maybe the diseases won't really be such a huge problem because our anivirals will become as good as our antibiotics.
The one thing that can be said with pretty high certainty is that for the most part it will be a completely different world in the second half of the 21st century.
Looking at stuff in the second half of the 20th century to predict the 21st isn't going to cut it, the same way that looking at politics and wars in the 1860s wouldn't produce any useful results about the 1960s.
Earlier near-misses are better known because secrecy was lifted. But such events still happen, like nuclear alert in Russia in 1995, Indian-Pakistan standoff in 2001, Ebola 2014. So the main question is if general safety and sanity lines will rise?
And they probably rise in main superpowers but we have many new nuclear countries as well as new risky technologies.
We don't know what kind of technologies will be dominating in the second half of 21 century, but more important question is what kind of safety levels will be used?
We could see that in general safety is growing in all domains: nuclear, cars, planes are safer now. But also number of users is also growing which may result in more accidents.
So near-misses may be very preliminary and rough estimate of general safety levels which is typical to humanity and thus could be used to make reasonable expectation about future risks.
It also shows that rising general safety levels in all domains may be universal instruments to prevent global catastrophes.
But also the number of "trails" is rising and it rises a possibility of even very improbable catastrophies