What do you think of the human subspecies base rate? In some ways, I think of the position of being human with the arrival of the AI species to be more similar to being a non-sapiens human with the arrival of homo sapiens, than e.g. being wooly mammooths or lions when humans arrived. In particular, I think of the relevant ecological “niches” as closer, and we may conjecture that AIs will have more resource competition with humans than humans with elephants.
Yeah, this is an interesting one. I’d basically agree with what you say here. I looked into it and came away thinking (a) it’s very unclear what the actual base rate is, but (b) it seems like it probably roughly resembles the general species one I have here. Given (b), I bumped up how much weight I put on the species reference class, but I did not include the human subspecies as a reference class here given (a).
From my exploration, it looked like there had been loose claims about many of them going extinct because of Homo sapiens, but it seemed like this was probably not true in the relevant sense of “extinct” except possibly in the cases of Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis. By relevant sense of “extinct”, I mean dying off/ceasing to reproduce rather than interbreeding. This seems to be the best paper on the topic, concluding that climate change drove most of the extinctions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220304760
As that paper says, Homo sapiens may have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals. I found suggestions in the case of Homo floresiensis to be pretty rough. So my take was that there was one species in the Homo genus that might have gone extinct because of Homo sapiens out of ~18 or so. That looks pretty similar to the means I take away from species extinctions (0.5-6%), but I felt it was too unclear to put a number on that gave added value.
To confirm, you find the climate change extinction hypotheses very credible here? I know very little about the topic except I vaguely recall that some scholars also advanced climate change as the hypothesis for the megafauna extinctions but these days it’s generally considered substantially less credible than human origin.
From what I can tell, the climate change one seems like the one with the most support in the literature. I’m not sure how much the consensus in favor of the human cause of megafauna extinctions (which I buy) generalizes to the extinction of other species in the Homo genus. Most of the Homo extinctions happened much earlier than the megafauna ones. But it could be—I have not given much thought to whether this consensus generalizes.
The other thing is that “extinction” sometimes happened in the sense that the species interbred with the larger population of Homo sapiens, and I would not count that as the relevant sort of extinction here.
What do you think of the human subspecies base rate? In some ways, I think of the position of being human with the arrival of the AI species to be more similar to being a non-sapiens human with the arrival of homo sapiens, than e.g. being wooly mammooths or lions when humans arrived. In particular, I think of the relevant ecological “niches” as closer, and we may conjecture that AIs will have more resource competition with humans than humans with elephants.
Yeah, this is an interesting one. I’d basically agree with what you say here. I looked into it and came away thinking (a) it’s very unclear what the actual base rate is, but (b) it seems like it probably roughly resembles the general species one I have here. Given (b), I bumped up how much weight I put on the species reference class, but I did not include the human subspecies as a reference class here given (a).
From my exploration, it looked like there had been loose claims about many of them going extinct because of Homo sapiens, but it seemed like this was probably not true in the relevant sense of “extinct” except possibly in the cases of Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis. By relevant sense of “extinct”, I mean dying off/ceasing to reproduce rather than interbreeding. This seems to be the best paper on the topic, concluding that climate change drove most of the extinctions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220304760
As that paper says, Homo sapiens may have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals. I found suggestions in the case of Homo floresiensis to be pretty rough. So my take was that there was one species in the Homo genus that might have gone extinct because of Homo sapiens out of ~18 or so. That looks pretty similar to the means I take away from species extinctions (0.5-6%), but I felt it was too unclear to put a number on that gave added value.
Thanks for the reply! I appreciate it and will think further.
To confirm, you find the climate change extinction hypotheses very credible here? I know very little about the topic except I vaguely recall that some scholars also advanced climate change as the hypothesis for the megafauna extinctions but these days it’s generally considered substantially less credible than human origin.
From what I can tell, the climate change one seems like the one with the most support in the literature. I’m not sure how much the consensus in favor of the human cause of megafauna extinctions (which I buy) generalizes to the extinction of other species in the Homo genus. Most of the Homo extinctions happened much earlier than the megafauna ones. But it could be—I have not given much thought to whether this consensus generalizes.
The other thing is that “extinction” sometimes happened in the sense that the species interbred with the larger population of Homo sapiens, and I would not count that as the relevant sort of extinction here.
Interesting discussion, Linch and Zach. Relatedly, people may want to check the episode of Dwarkesh Podcast with David Reich.