[HN Gopher] The world should think better about catastrophic and...
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The world should think better about catastrophic and existential
risks
Author : prostoalex
Score : 65 points
Date : 2020-06-30 02:30 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| williesleg wrote:
| Oh can't wait to hear all the experts here!
| jonmc12 wrote:
| The 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-danie...
| naasking wrote:
| There are unfortunately many existential risks:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk
|
| * https://www.existential-risk.org/
| supernova87a wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| 3. 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 wrote:
| If 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.
| jaakl wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| Uhhh, climate change will absolutely kill us all if we don't
| do something.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Ban AI
| nutjob2 wrote:
| "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.
| imafish wrote:
| Cant read the article but +1 for title.
| 9nGQluzmnq3M wrote:
| http://archive.is/SH3EU
| grapeape25 wrote:
| You can read the full article if you disable JavaScript.
| jkuria wrote:
| Prior discussion here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659120
| golemiprague wrote:
| They 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.
| [deleted]
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I 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.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Governments should focus more on long-termism than short-termism
| in general.
| caiobegotti wrote:
| For better or worse most politicians terms are "short" in that
| sense so you get where this thinking come from.
| dekhn wrote:
| i 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.
| digitallogic wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Besides, if the meteor's big enough, it'll also take out your
| customers.
| simonh wrote:
| This 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Doesn't appear to be a problem. Print money to accelerate out
| of the quagmire seems sensible.
| Forge36 wrote:
| Setting aside money as "pandemic" is a problem. Setting aside
| money for "emergency" helps reduce impact.
|
| 1970 gas shortages 2000 dotcom bubble burst 2008 housing
| crisis
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| >...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.
| Forge36 wrote:
| But they do care about power outages, hurricanes, tornadoes
| (maybe not in US-EAST1), cut fiber lines
|
| The probability any one very rare event is low. Preparing for
| it helps mitigate risks for many other issues however.
| colordrops wrote:
| Elon musk is a counter example to your theory.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| Not quite. Elon's strategies involve finding product/market
| fit in the short term for technologies that will be critical
| in the long term. But the companies themselves are on a
| knifes edge of survival. For example, if a meteor struck
| tomorrow, neither Tesla or SpaceX would have any advantage
| over their competitors. And if anything, because he runs his
| companies so close to the edge, his companies are uniquely
| susceptible to external catastrophic events.
| [deleted]
| uoflcards22 wrote:
| Just read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan" if you want
| more thinking about this topic..
| nemo44x wrote:
| And 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.
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