My (rough) numbers suggest a 6% chance that 100% of people die
According to a fitted power law, that implies a 239% chance that 10% of people die
On 1, yes, and over the next 10 years or so (20 % chance of superintelligent AI over the next 10 years, times 30 % chance of extinction quickly after superintelligent AI)? On 2, yes, for a power law with a tail index of 1.60, which is the mean tail index of the power laws fitted to battle deaths per war here.
I think it’s very unlikely that an AI catastrophe kills 10% of the population in the next 10 years (not 10^-6 unlikely, more like 10^-3 unlikely).
I meant to ask about the probability of human population becoming less than (not around) 90 % as large as now over the next 10 years, which has to be higher than the probability of human extinction. Since 10^-3 << 6 %, I guess your probability of a population loss of 10 % or more is just slighly higher than your probability of human extinction.
Even if you put 99% credence in this model, surely P(extinction) will be dominated by other models? Even within the model, P(extinction) should be higher than that based on uncertainty about the value of the alpha parameter.
I think using a power law will tend to overestimate the probability of human extinction, as my sense is that tail distributions usually start to decay faster as severity increases. This is the case for the annual conflict deaths as a fraction of the global population, and arguably annual epidemic/pandemic deaths as a fraction of the global population. The reason is that the tail distribution has to reach 0 for a 100 % population loss, whereas a power law will predict that going from 8 billion to 16 billion deaths is as likely as going from 4 billion to 8 billion deaths.
On 1, yes, and over the next 10 years or so (20 % chance of superintelligent AI over the next 10 years, times 30 % chance of extinction quickly after superintelligent AI)? On 2, yes, for a power law with a tail index of 1.60, which is the mean tail index of the power laws fitted to battle deaths per war here.
I meant to ask about the probability of human population becoming less than (not around) 90 % as large as now over the next 10 years, which has to be higher than the probability of human extinction. Since 10^-3 << 6 %, I guess your probability of a population loss of 10 % or more is just slighly higher than your probability of human extinction.
I think using a power law will tend to overestimate the probability of human extinction, as my sense is that tail distributions usually start to decay faster as severity increases. This is the case for the annual conflict deaths as a fraction of the global population, and arguably annual epidemic/pandemic deaths as a fraction of the global population. The reason is that the tail distribution has to reach 0 for a 100 % population loss, whereas a power law will predict that going from 8 billion to 16 billion deaths is as likely as going from 4 billion to 8 billion deaths.