Yeah, I think I recall David Thorstad complaining that Ordâs estimate was far too high also.
Be careful not to conflate âexistential riskâ in the special Bostrom-dervied definition that I think Ord, and probably Will as well, are using with âextinction riskâ though. X-risk from climate *can* be far higher than extinction risk, because regressing to a pre-industrial state and then not succeeding in reindustrialising (perhaps because easily accessible coal has been used up), counts as an existential risk, even though it doesnât involve literal extinction. (Though from memory, I think Ord is quite dismissive of the possibility that there wonât be enough accessible coal to reindustrialise, but I think Will is a bit more concerned about this?)
Thanks for the clarification, David. There are so many concepts of existential risk, and they are often so vague that I think estimates of existential risk can vary by many orders of magnitude even holding constant the definition in words of a given author. So I would prefer discussions to focus on outcomes like human extinction which are well defined, even if their chance remains very hard to estimate.
I also think human extinction without recovery to a similarly promising state is much less likely than human extinction. For a time from human extinction to that kind of recovery described by an exponential distribution with a mean of 66 M years, which was the time from the last mass extinction until humans evolving, and 1 billion years during which the Earth will remain habitable, and therefore recovery is possible, the probability of recovery conditional on human extinction would be 2.63*10^-7 (= e^(-10^9/â(66*10^6))).
Yeah, I think I recall David Thorstad complaining that Ordâs estimate was far too high also.
Be careful not to conflate âexistential riskâ in the special Bostrom-dervied definition that I think Ord, and probably Will as well, are using with âextinction riskâ though. X-risk from climate *can* be far higher than extinction risk, because regressing to a pre-industrial state and then not succeeding in reindustrialising (perhaps because easily accessible coal has been used up), counts as an existential risk, even though it doesnât involve literal extinction. (Though from memory, I think Ord is quite dismissive of the possibility that there wonât be enough accessible coal to reindustrialise, but I think Will is a bit more concerned about this?)
Thanks for the clarification, David. There are so many concepts of existential risk, and they are often so vague that I think estimates of existential risk can vary by many orders of magnitude even holding constant the definition in words of a given author. So I would prefer discussions to focus on outcomes like human extinction which are well defined, even if their chance remains very hard to estimate.
I also think human extinction without recovery to a similarly promising state is much less likely than human extinction. For a time from human extinction to that kind of recovery described by an exponential distribution with a mean of 66 M years, which was the time from the last mass extinction until humans evolving, and 1 billion years during which the Earth will remain habitable, and therefore recovery is possible, the probability of recovery conditional on human extinction would be 2.63*10^-7 (= e^(-10^9/â(66*10^6))).