32 ms·
The world should think better about catastrophic and existential risks
- imafish 6y agoCant read the article but +1 for title.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y agohttp://archive.is/SH3EU http://archive.is/SH3EU
- grapeape25 6y agoYou can read the full article if you disable JavaScript.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- spaetzleesser 6y agoI don't think world can prepare for nuclear war or pandemic that's dealer than COVID-19. Our systems will break down and hopefully people will figure out how to move forward.
- dekhn 6y agoi have a mini-theory in which any group that allocates resources to existential risks will operate at a disadvantage (in the short term) to groups that do not, thus it's likely that anybody who does this will lose to competitors (businesses, countries) that do not. FOr example, cloud providers who do not plan for meteor-based regional outages (which occur rarely) believe they can home all their data in a single region. This is much cheaper and will allow the provider a better profit margin, and realistically, not a lot of customers care about their data surviving a meteor taking out US-EAST1.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- digitallogic 6y agoYou don't need to worry about a meteor taking out us-east-1 because us-east-1 will take itself out several times over before a meteor ever shows up.
- DavidSJ 6y agoBesides, if the meteor’s big enough, it’ll also take out your customers.
- simonh 6y agoThis is a significant issue, any company that set aside resources to protect against a pandemic after the Spanish Flu would have been operating with increased costs for a full 100 years. Yet when the virus hit and companies struggled, I saw plenty of comments saying these companies deserved to fail. I’m all for capitalism and the benefits of market forces, but that’s ludicrous. I’m not saying they should all be bailed out either, companies come and go to be honest, but what we do need to do is ensure our vital interests and the infrastructure we depend on is secure and that’s going to take a pragmatic approach. The global cost of the virus is astronomical, but protecting ourselves effectively against a new virus doesn’t have to be crippling. The same is true of many other credible risks the article covers. Such preparations could even offer additional useful benefits. It’s just going to take vision and pragmatism I’m not sure our political leaders have in them these days.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago>...vital interests and the infrastructure we depend on is secure and that’s going to take a pragmatic approach. I argue for letting these businesses fail, even if vital, because, it seems, the powers that be have forgotten to take care of them, regulate them, and not get captured by private interests, for decades now. Infrastructure across the the country is literally crumbling. Major dams have failed this year. I fully expect to suffer much more before those with the power to delegate resources where needed will find the will too.
- supernova87a 6y agoIt's not a new idea, right? People are bad at valuing far-off very-bad risks compared to inconsequential but tangible near-term risks. And bad at valuing broadly distributed hardships versus concentrated individual pain. It's exactly why we can't solve climate change, right?
- DavidSJ 6y agoIt’s one reason we’ve had trouble solving climate change (I wouldn’t go so far as to say we can’t). Two more reasons: 1. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons, where many actors, at the individual, corporate, and national level, have incentives to worsen the problem even if nearly everyone would benefit if they all behaved differently. 2. The climate is a complex system, so it’s hard to educate the public about how it works, and easy for bad faith actors or pseudoscientific cranks to obfuscate the discussion.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago3. It is also easy for bad faith actors to exploit the response for their own benefit, undermining the nascent response directly, and undermining it indirectly by undermining those who argue for change with integrity
- colinmhayes 6y agoIf you're interested in existential risks check out effective altruism. It's a philanthropic movement whose idea is to maximize the amount of good we can do with our resources. Much of the research is focused on x-risks. I've come to the conclusion that non-profit is the only sector that can tackle x-risks because it's not profitable and there's no political will, which pretty much leaves ea researchers as the only people looking at the area.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoNote that some popular effective altruists have a little bit of tunnel vision when it comes to X-risks, which leads them to overfund X-risk-due-to-AI over something like, say, X-risk-due-to-asteroids. (X-risk-due-to-nanotech is being suitably supported by not funding nanotech.) Plus, some people working on the AI X-risk problem are doing it for nothing, which means the state of funding is a bit weird.
- computerphage 6y ago> tunnel vision when it comes to X-risks, which leads them to overfund X-risk-due-to-AI over something like, say, X-risk-due-to-asteroids. Risks from natural events like asteroids are actually quite well understood and we have tight bounds that they aren't that risky per century. The natural risks cause area probably deserves more funding on a global level, but EAs are definitely thinking about it. It's literally the first section in 80k's intro article about X-risks: https://80000hours.org/articles/extinction-risk/ https://80000hours.org/articles/extinction-risk/
- nutjob2 6y ago"The world should think better about catastrophic and existential risks" "Plans and early-warning systems are always a good idea" Yes, we know, but how do achieve anything when people are deep in denial and reading conspiracy theories on Facebook is considered "news"? You have to consider that the current pandemic is relatively tractable compared to the climate crisis, and we're failing miserably even at that.
- jkuria 6y agoPrior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659120
- alexfromapex 6y agoGovernments should focus more on long-termism than short-termism in general.
- caiobegotti 6y agoFor better or worse most politicians terms are "short" in that sense so you get where this thinking come from.
- titzer 6y agoWhich usually involves stopping, or at least short-circuiting the short-term profit motive. But governments have a lot of power and wield a lot of money. The public purse is a nice prize for corrupt corporations to target, and chipping away at regulations that keep this machine pointed the right direction for the long term is all the rage across a whole side of the political spectrum.
- acheron 6y agoSounds like a good way to get voted out in favor of the other guy who promises short term benefits.
- uoflcards22 6y agoJust read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan" if you want more thinking about this topic..
- nemo44x 6y agoAnd even better his concept of building anti-fragile systems. We can model things, predict things, etc - but in the end everything is more complex than we can know so as to appear random. We can’t predict what will happen but we can build systems that are anti-fragile, or robust at the minimum.
- bpodgursky 6y agoBan AI
- williesleg 6y agoOh can't wait to hear all the experts here!
- jonmc12 6y agoThe recent conversation between Tom Bilyeu and Daniel Schmachtenberger is a great primer on this topic. Tom inquires about existential risk from a pragmatic, entrepreneurial point of view. This Economist article only scratches the surface of the risk of accelerating technology development. Schmachtenberger provides a framework for thought and much deeper insights in this direction. https://impacttheory.libsyn.com/conversations-with-tom-daniel-schmachtenberger-on-what-we-must-do-now-to-stop-the-destruction-of-civilization https://impacttheory.libsyn.com/conversations-with-tom-danie...
- halfcat 6y agoI wish there were more interviews with Daniel Schmachtenberger. His interview on Eric Weinstein’s podcast [0] was also great. [0] https://youtu.be/_b4qKv1Ctv8 https://youtu.be/_b4qKv1Ctv8
- naasking 6y agoThere are unfortunately many existential risks: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk * https://www.existential-risk.org/ https://www.existential-risk.org/
- menybuvico 6y agoAnd yet, one of the largest risks is that our modern society simply assumes that none of those will ever happen. When I grew up in the 80's, society was built around the expectation that WW3 was pretty imminent, and while I'm quite happy that the cold war is over, modern society would most likely be better of if we stopped taking everything for granted and start preparing for things that we know will happen at some point. Like pandemics. Some kind of shit will happen at some point. That's about the only thing that is certain. We should use the time we have until then for building a non-fragile society.
- jaakl 6y agoIt is a bit syrreal to read about low probability/high impact risks while we have a very high probability/catastrophic impact event already started.
- jefftk 6y agoWhat catastrophic impact event are you referring to? Covid-19? Climate change? Neither of those are existential risks: they're incredibly unlikely to wipe us out. The kind of high impact risks the article is about are much worse.
- chickenpotpie 6y agoUhhh, climate change will absolutely kill us all if we don't do something.
- apsec112 6y agoNo climate forecast that I'm aware of predicts human extinction; much of Earth would still be habitable by humans even at +20 C (although that would trigger a huge mass extinction among other species). There's a big gap between "pretty bad" and "literally no survivors".
- stevens32 6y ago20c being habitable seems like a stretch to me, and my Google Fu only turned up mentions of Antarctica hitting 20c. Have any references for that number? Most reports I've read say a +2c will cause significant problems globally.
- CraigJPerry 6y ago+2c would make plenty of inhabited areas uninhabitable, ive never seen predictions of +20c, what would that even look like? The crop failures and localised starvation of +2c would become global at +20c. The migration of people, something that humans are historically absolutely terrible at handling, would be on an unimaginable level. Imagine the bloodshed.
- golemiprague 6y agoThey can't even decide if we need to wear masks or not and everything is politicised anyway, I still remember the reactions when Trump tried to stop flights from China and Europe. So how can we prepare for something we don't even know will happen and how? Sometimes you just need to think while moving and incorporating feedback as things happen.
- spodek 6y agoThe world should act better about catastrophic and existential risks. We think fine. We think when things get serious we'll act. Then things get serious -- like billions of people locked down, plastic in our bloodstreams, would-be leaders exacerbating problems, etc -- and we don't act how we thought we would. The problem is our behavior. Thinking is relevant, but behavior is the issue.
- thimkerbell 6y agoThe problem is that our priorities can be made to work against us.
- briefcomment 6y agoCan you elaborate on that?
- kingaillas 6y agoI'm reading that as: in a world of scarce resources, there is always going to something higher priority to deal with than extremely low risk catastrophic/existential events.
- jointpdf 6y agorisk = probability * impact - climate change: very high probability * very high impact - terrorism: low/med probability * low/med impact - thermonuclear war: low-ish(?) probability * extremely high impact - superhuman AGI: ??? probability * ??? impact (likely very high impact, but + or - is uncertain) In a standard rational decision-making framework, if: cost of action < risk, then: take action. [Edit: Of course this is all a gross simplification. See more here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_decision https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_decision]
- bumby 6y agoWell said, but I believe the “thinking” problem is because we are not generally wired to think in a statistical sense. We can assess the severity fairly well, but we have all kinds of cognitive biases that get in the way of accurate probability assessments. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
- bernardv 6y agoThere’s an insurance product for that. Pandemic insurance is available for businesses - it is a cost that will, by definition, not likely pay back. But if an event occurs it will pay out as expected. Human behavior is such that only about 12% of Californians in at-risk areas purchase earthquake insurance - even though many significant earthquakes have occurred in living memory.
- buzzert 6y agoThere's a great article in this month's Wired all about this: https://www.wired.com/story/nathan-wolfe-global-economic-fallout-pandemic-insurance/ https://www.wired.com/story/nathan-wolfe-global-economic-fal... The short version is that this guy was selling exactly that kind of insurance, but way too many companies waited until "next year" to actually go through with buying it. Perhaps things will be different now.
- blendergeek 6y agoUnfortunately, pandemic insurance is unlikely to work in the real world. A pandemic by definition affects the entire globe, meaning that if pandemic insurance needs to pay out, it will have to pay out for all policy holders, all at once. Given that the business model of insurance companies is to spread risk across all policy holders, it is impossible for insurance companies to payout all policies all at once.
- chadash 6y agoNot to mention the fact that pricing pandemic insurance is going to be very hard. Insurance companies generally don't like to take risks... they like things that are highly predictable and can be modeled. The percentage of people aged 40 who will die in a given year is predictable. So are the chances of car accidents by 17 year old female drivers. When the next pandemic will come is anyone's guess though. And lacking a decent way to model a risk like this, the insurance company will inevitably need to charge a high premium to make this a worthwhile product. Meanwhile, consumers will balk at the high premium and not buy the coverage.
- 6y ago
- wintorez 6y agoNah, it will be fine. /s
- gonational 6y agoLet people be. There’s way too much “we need to start...” bullshit these days, and mostly spearheaded by the same group of ~500 businesses and media corps[1]; as if any of these fucking mega corporations give a shit about any of us. When everything you believe in starts aligning perfectly with the corporations that have been screwing you for decades (tax havens, monopolizing the industries your parents worked in, sending all our jobs over seas to underaged slaves, dumping toxins into our rivers, etc.), it’s time to rethink your thinking. 1. took me all of three seconds to find an example for the publisher in question, in what looks like The Economist running pseudo-critic defense for Nike’s sweatshops, etc.: https://www.economist.com/business/1999/02/25/sweatshop-wars https://www.economist.com/business/1999/02/25/sweatshop-wars
- eigenschwarz 6y agoHuh? Please tell me which one of these "~500 businesses and media corps" is at work here and what exactly they are saying "we need to start..." doing that is, in actuality, screwing us. Else your diatribe has zero relevance.
- core-questions 6y agoYour post is an example of tactical nihilism. Suddenly, you've forgotten about every corporation that has reprehensible politics that you dislike? Suddenly, every media organization is truthful, every sponsor an altruist? Honestly, how have you not seen these "we need to start doing X" posts? They rain down from the heavens on a weekly basis. "It's time to stop doing X, and do Y". "Here's why Z is problematic." It's literally corporate moralizing, sprinkled with doomsday predictions and rationalizations for hating the enemy du jour. It gets so very tiresome.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoThis thread: 1. Topic A is done by evil X. 2. No it's not. 3. Why are you trying to distract from the evil of X?
- jansan 6y ago
- jdlyga 6y agoCovid and climate change aren't one country problems. Just like a building on fire doesn't affect just one office. The problem is we need top-down coordination for worldwide threats. We need the UN, or a UN-like organization (United Earth?).
- longtom 6y agoThe problem is that very large institutions become corrupt with very high certainty. It poses a huge near-term risk itself, so we somehow need to solve coordination problems while staying decentralized.
- landryraccoon 6y agoWhy do people say Covid was a black swan event? It was not, it was utterly predictable, if not the specific virus, then at least the course of its spread. The black swan is our collective ineptitude in handling the crisis, not the virus itself. We’ve had pandemics repeatedly throughout recorded history and before. It’s not as though the world went “a virus what is this we’ve never seen anything like it”. The black plague, the flu of 1918, and numerous other examples of epidemic diseases have struck down multitudes over thousands of years. Even Sars was just a score of years ago. We were simply inept when it came to Covid-19. We dropped the ball. The thing about Covid isn’t how unexpected it was, it’s how utterly predictable it has been at every single turn.
- fulafel 6y agoBlack swan events may be predictable in their eventuality but are blind spots for human psychology because they are sufficiently rare.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoBlack swan events aren't predictable by definition. They're usually events sufficiently rare that when they happen, it's the first time that category of event has been observed. This, we can't assess their likelihood since we have no real prior. So a market crash, plague, asteroid, etc. aren't black swan events. They just aren't rare enough. We've seen them. They have an annual probability. Hell, a COVID-like illness isn't even all that unlikely. A lethal fungal plague might be, since we've never seen such a thing in humans, although we've seen that in other mammals so it shouldn't come as a total shock. As a better example, an AI apocalypse would be a black swan since we've never observed such an event and have no really great way of assessing its likelihood. Although we've some idea of that possibility. To really get at the meat of it, consider the name. Black swans came as a surprise when Europeans visited Australia because a non-white swan had never before been observed. No one would even have thought to ask the question "what are the odds you find an all black swan in Australia?"
- fulafel 6y ago
- jacquesm 6y agoThere was nothing unpredictable about this. In 2013 I got handed a copy of a book called 'Spillover, Animal infections and the next pandemic' by David Quammen. It was pretty much a storyboard for how COVD-19 (and other) diseases come into play and spread around the world. Totally predictable, in excruciating detail. https://books.google.nl/books/about/Spillover_Animal_Infections_and_the_Next.html?id=RMmxxYUBQhgC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.nl/books/about/Spillover_Animal_Infecti...
- luismmolina 6y agoSame. I am still surprised when someone says this was totally unpredictable. That book gave me a great overview of what could happen. For example I had a discussion with some friends about facemasks, they claimed that they were not useful, like governments were saying. In the book I remember that almost every researcher regrets not buying more, they are useful. At least it gave me the ability to take more informed decisions.
- gorgoiler 6y agoA sobering thought is that there’s little to stop Covids 20.1 through 20.4 emerging as endemic human diseases next week. It’s not like an earthquake where the disaster also relieves stress, albeit in the long term.
- kashyapc 6y agoWe'll also do well by taking a leaf from the Stoics, who wrote only 2000+ years ago ... on the importance of "prerehearsal of future ills". The meaning of it is explained in a note (24.2) from Seneca's Letters on Ethics (the full collection of 124 letters; excellently translated by Graver and Long): "The advice to reflect on all possible misfortunes is not meant to license groundless worry but rather to afford an accurate assessment of what a human life is likely to include, thus mitigating the psychological impact of inevitable misfortune. [...]" --- And here's a rousing passage by Seneca from letter 91 ("A terrible fire at Lyon"): "When one is unprepared for a disaster, it has a greater effect: shock intensifies the blow. No mortal can fail to grieve more deeply when amazement is added to the loss [...] "Absolutely anything can be overthrown in its finest hour by the caprice of fortune. Th brighter it shines, the more it is liable to be attacked and shaken: for fortune, nothing is arduous, nothing difficult. Not always does it come by a single road, not always by paths that are well worn. Sometimes it turns our hands against each other; at other times, relying on its own resources, it finds dangers for us that need no agent. No moment is exempt. In the midst of pleasure, things arise that cause us pain. In a time of peace, war breaks out, and all that one had relied on for security becomes an object of fear: friends turn into foes, allies into enemies. The calm of a summer day is suddenly transformed into storms greater than those of winter. Even without an enemy at hand, we suffer war’s effects. If there are no other reasons for calamity, excessive prosperity finds its own reasons. The most careful people are attacked by illness; the sturdiest by physical decline; punishments affect those who are completely guiltless; riots those who live in total seclusion. People who have almost forgotten the power of chance find themselves picked out to experience some novel misfortune. The achievements of a lifetime, put together with great effort and many answered prayers, are cast to ruin in a single day. But to speak of a day is to make our hastening calamities slower than they really are. An hour, a mere moment is enough to overturn an empire. It would be some relief to our frailty and our concerns if everything came to an end as slowly as it comes into existence. The reality is that it takes time for things to grow but little or no time for them to be lost."
- Tepix 6y agoPerhaps a bit naive standpoint: If enough power companies buy insurance against a solar storm, the insurers will have to stockpile those huge transformers that take 6-12 months to build. If they don't buy such an isurance they are negligent and can be sued.
- dcanelhas 6y agoLet's see how it plays out with climate change... This stub is the worst.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y agoAre we trying to build a responsible society from irresponsible individuals? Because if we're talking about individuals being responsible, we probably should start from abolishing unemployment benefits (everyone must build an emergency fund), retirement benefits (you didn't put anything into your 401k? You'll die of hunger) and all other sorts of social stuff. Otherwise it sounds like "we, as a society, must be responsible, while I personally refuse to".
- otikik 6y ago> There is little planning anywhere for what to do in response to a volcanic eruption large enough to cool and dry the climate around the world, as the eruption of Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, did in 1815. Here I am, thinking about how to provoke a massive volcanic eruption in order to save what's left of our ecosystem. In case you have been living under a rock: At the end of 2019 we had massive fires in Australia, due to unusually high temperatures. And now the Russian Arctic is experiencing the same - https://news.yahoo.com/russian-arctic-sets-fantastical-heat-records-weather-chief-132627542.html https://news.yahoo.com/russian-arctic-sets-fantastical-heat-...
- makerofspoons 6y agoMuch cheaper to just spray sulfur dioxide from a plane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...