By 2100 hopefully we won't have the third world any more.
Swapping nuclear warfare for end of third world poverty would be a good exchange for most people. And nuclear warfare is a remote possibility, while third world poverty is real and here with us now.
Also notice how much better is life in Hiroshima compared to Congo.
What should be realized here, however, is that Hiroshima could become a relatively ok place because it could receive a huge amount of help for being part of the country with such a high GDP.
Hiroshima didn't magically get better. A large scale nuclear war would destroy our economy, and thus our capability to respond and patch the damage that way. For that matter, I'm not even sure our undisturbed response systems could be able to deal with more than a few nuked cities. Also please consider that Hiroshima was nuked by a 18 kt bomb, which is nothing like the average 400 - 500 kt nukes we have now.
1 ) That human beings are all individual instances of the exact same mind. You're really the same person as any random other one, and vice versa. And of course that single mind had to be someone blind enough not to chance upon that fact ever, regardless of how numerous he was.
2 ) That there are only 16 real people, of which you are, and that this is all but a VR game. Subsequently results in all the players simultaneously being still unable to be conscious of that fact, AND asking that you and the AI be removed from the game. (Inspiration : misunderstanding situation in page 55-56 of Iain Banks's Look to Windwards).
3 ) That we are in the second age of the universe : time has been running backwards for a few billion years. Our minds are actually the result of the original minds of previous people being rewound, their whole life to be undone, and finally negated into oblivion. All our thoughts processes are of course horribly distorted, insane mirror versions of the originals, and make no sense whatsoever (in the original timeframe, which is the valid one).
4 )
5 ) That our true childhood is between age 0 and ~ 50-90 (with a few exceptional individuals reaching maturity sooner or later). If you thought the 'adult conspiracy' already lied a lot, and well to 'children', prepare yourself for a shock in a few decades.
6 ) That the AI just deduced that the laws of physics can only be consistent with us being eternally trapped in a time loop. The extent of the time loop is : thirty two seconds spread evenly around now. Nothing in particular can be done about it. Enjoy your remaining 10 seconds.
7 ) Causality doesn't exist. Not only is the universe timeless, but causality is an epiphenomenon, which we only believe because of a confusion of our ideas. Who ever observed a "causation" ? Did you, like, expect causation particles jumping between atoms or something ? Only correlation exists.
8 ) We actually exist in a simulation. The twist is : somewhere out there, some people really crossed the line with the ruling AI. We're slightly modified versions of these people : modified in a way as to experience the maximum amount of their zuul feeling, which is the very worst nirdy you could imagine.
9 ) The universe has actually 5 spatial macro dimensions, of which we perceive only 3. Considering what we look like if you take the other 2 into account, this obliviousness may actually not be all too surprising.
10 ) That any single human being has actually a 22 % probability of not being able to be conscious of one or more of these 9 statements above.
How about this: The process of conscious thought has no causal relationship with human actions. It is a self-contained, useless process that reflects on memories and plans for the future. The plans bear no relationship to future actions, but we deceive ourselves about this after the fact. Behavior is an emergent property that cannot be consciously understood.
I read this post on my phone in the subway, and as I walked back to my apartment thinking of something to post, it felt different because I was suspicious that every experience was a mass self-deception.
Funnily enough, you realize this is quite similar to what you'd need to make Chalmers right, and p-zombies possible, right ?
Total extinction has expected value that's pretty much indistinguishable from minus infinity.
Global thermonuclear war? Oh sure it would kill some people but expected number of deaths and amount of suffering from let's say malaria or lack of access to fresh water in the next 100 years is far higher than expected death and suffering from a global thermonuclear war in the next 100 years.
Even our most recent total war, WW2, killed laughably small portion of the fighting population relative to historical norms. There's no reason to suspect WW3 would be any different, so number of deaths would most likely be rather limited. And as countries with low birth rates (that is pretty much all countries today) have historical record of trying very hard not to get into any war that could endanger their population (as opposed to send bombs to other countries and such), chance of such a war is tiny.
So let's say 1% chance of global thermonuclear war killing 100 million people in the next 100 years (expected 1 million deaths) versus 1 million deaths a year from malaria, and 2 from diarrhea. I think we have our priorities wrong if we care about global thermonuclear wars much.
(of course people might disagree with these estimates, in which case they would see a global thermonuclear war as more important issue than me)
Under those assumptions your estimates are sound, really. However, should we only count the direct deaths incurred as a consequence of a direct nuclear strike ? Or should we also take into account the nuclear fallout, radiations, nuclear winter, ecosystems crashing down, massive economy and infrastructure disruption, etc. ? How much more worse does it get if we take such considerations into account ?
Aside from those considerations, I really agree with your idea of getting our priorities right, based on numbers. That's exactly the reason why I'd advocate antiagathic research above a lot of other things, which actually kill and make less people suffer than aging itself does, but not everyone seems to agree to that.
That's a function of the venue of this discussion. The blog's founder goes to existential risk conferences - and so here we see the opinions of his supporters.
Doom prophecies are an old phenomenon. The explanation appears to me to be mainly sociological: warning others about risk makes you look as though you are contributing positively. If the risk doesn't actually exist, then it needs manufacturing - so that you can still alert others to the danger.
Of course, the bigger the risk, the more important it is to tell people about it. Existential risks are the "biggest" risks of all - so they are the most important ones to tell people about. Plus, alerting people to the risk might help you to SAVE THE WORLD! Thus the modern success of the "doom" meme.
I see your point, sometimes we may have already written the bottom line, and all that comes afterward is trying to justify it.
However, if an existential risk is conceivable, how much would you be ready to pay, or do, to investigate it ? Your answer could plausibly range from nothing, to everything you have. There ought to be a healthy middle there.
I could certainly understand how someone would arrive at saying that the problem isn't worth investigating further, because that person has a definite explanation of why other people care about that particular question, their reason being biased.
I'd for instance think of religion, as an example of that. I wouldn't read the Bible and centuries of apologetics and debates to decide that God does or doesn't exist. I'd just check to see if at first, people started to justify the existence of a god for other reasons than it existing. That's certainly a much more efficient way of looking at the problem.
Is there no sum of money, no amount of effort, however trivial, that could nevertheless be expanded on such an investigation, considering its possible repercussions, however unlikely those seem to be ?
Prepare for disappointment, then. My estimate of the chances of humans persisting for much longer is pretty tiny. Future civilisation is likely to be descended from current civilisation - but humans are much more likely to survive in museums than anywhere else. That outcome is not necessarily a disaster - it could be one of the best possible outcomes. Having humans in charge would be really, really bad for civilisation's health and spaceworthiness.
A fair point. So what you're telling me is that we should desire a future civilization that is descended from our own, probably one that will have some common points with current humanity, like, some of our values, desires (or values, desires who'd have grown from our own) etc. ?
millions of deaths in Africa
According to this Wikipedia page, there were maybe 2.4 million deaths due to AIDS in the whole world in 2007. I doubt the Pope was responsible for most of them.
How many deaths, directly or indirectly derived from the pope's prohibition, would be enough for his influence to be considered negative in this case ?
Re: technological progress indicates that risks in the future are worse than risks in the past
Technological progress has led to the current 6 billion backup copies of the human genome. Yet you argue it leads to increased risk? I do not follow your thinking. Surely technological progress has decreased existential risks, making civilisation's survival substantially more likely.
Technological progress seems to be necessary, but not sufficient to ensure our civilization's long term survival.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem quite adamant on arguing against the idea that our current civilization is in danger of extinction, when so many other people argue the other way around. This seems like it has the potential to degenerate into a fruitless debate, or even a flame war.
Yet you probably have some good points to make; why not think it over, and make a post about it, if your opinion is so different, and substantiated by facts and good reasoning, as I am sure it must be ?
I sometime wonder why people think this outcome is bad. It is what we will probably get - unless we manage to eliminate competetion and overrule natural selection. In that case, we will still probably get something very similar - since expansion is probably the best way to defend yourself against aliens.
I sometime wonder why people think this outcome is bad.
Mind if I ask, but, as opposed to considering it good ?
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But all that correlation has to be caused by something!
Well, kidding aside, your argument, taken from Pearl, seems elegant. I'll however have to read the book before I feel entitled to having an opinion on that one, as I haven't grokked the idea, merely a faint impression of it and how it sounds healthy.
So at this point, I only have some of my own ideas and intuitions about the problem, and haven't searched for the answers yet.
Some considerations though :
Our idea of causality is based upon a human intuition. Could it be that it is just as wrong as vitalism, time, little billiard balls bumping around, or the yet confused problem of consciousness ? That's what would bug me if I had no good technical explanation, one provably unbiased by my prior intuitive belief about causality (otherwise there's always the risk I've just been rationalizing my intuition).
Every time we observe "causality", we really only observe correlations, and then deduce that there is something more behind those. But is that a simple explanation ? Could we devise a simpler consistent explanation to account for our observation of correlations ? As in, totally doing away with causality ? Or at the very least, redefining causality as something that doesn't quite correspond to our folk definition of it ?
Grossly, my intuition, when I hear the word causality is something along the lines of
" Take event A and event B, where those events are very small, such that they aren't made of interconnected parts themselves - they are the parts, building blocks that can be used in bigger, complex systems. Place event A anywhere within the universe and time, then provided the rules of physics are the same each time we do that, and nothing interferes in, event B will always occur, with probability 1, independantly of my observing it or not." Ok, so could (and should ?) we say that causality is when a prior event implies a probability of one for a certain posterior event to occur ? Or else, is it then not probability 1, just an arbitrarily very high probability ?
In the latter case with less than 1 probability, then that really violates my folk notion of causality, and I don't really see what's causal about a thing that can capriciously choose to happen or not, even if the conditions are the same.
In the former case, I can see how that would be a very new thing, I mean, probability 1 for one event implying that another will occur ? What better, firmer foundation to build an universe upon ? It feels really, very comfortable and convenient, all too comfortable in fact.
Basically, neither of those possibilities strike me as obviously right, for those reasons and then some, the idea I have of causality is confused at best. And yet, I'd say it is not too unsophisticated or pondered as it stands. Which makes me wonder how people who'd have put less thought in it (probably a lot of people) can deservedly feel any more comfortable with saying it exists with no afterthought (almost everyone), even as they don't have any good explanation for it (which is a rare thing), such as perhaps the one given by Pearl.