Executive summary: An analysis of historical conflict deaths data suggests an astronomically low prior annual probability of a conflict causing human extinction.
Key points:
The analysis fits distributions to data on annual conflict deaths as a fraction of global population from 1400-2000.
Preprocessing was done to adjust for incomplete historical records, especially further back in time.
Fitting Pareto distributions to the rightmost tail of the data, the annual probability of extinction quickly becomes extremely low.
Results are sensitive to the distribution type, but focusing on the far right tail is most relevant for extinction risk.
The analysis suggests much lower extinction risk from conflicts than some other estimates, even accounting for modern weapons.
Extraordinary evidence would be needed to justify a meaningfully higher risk estimate.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Results are sensitive to the distribution type, but focusing on the far right tail is most relevant for extinction risk.
I guess reasonable distribution types will lead to astronomically low extinction risk as long as one focusses on the rightmost points of the tail distribution.
Extraordinary evidence would be needed to justify a meaningfully higher risk estimate.
To clarify:
Extraordinary evidence would be required to move up sufficiently many orders of magnitude for an AI, bio or nuclear conflict to have a decent chance of causing human extinction. I think underweighting the outside view is a major reason leading to overly high risk.
Executive summary: An analysis of historical conflict deaths data suggests an astronomically low prior annual probability of a conflict causing human extinction.
Key points:
The analysis fits distributions to data on annual conflict deaths as a fraction of global population from 1400-2000.
Preprocessing was done to adjust for incomplete historical records, especially further back in time.
Fitting Pareto distributions to the rightmost tail of the data, the annual probability of extinction quickly becomes extremely low.
Results are sensitive to the distribution type, but focusing on the far right tail is most relevant for extinction risk.
The analysis suggests much lower extinction risk from conflicts than some other estimates, even accounting for modern weapons.
Extraordinary evidence would be needed to justify a meaningfully higher risk estimate.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Thanks, SummaryBot!
I guess reasonable distribution types will lead to astronomically low extinction risk as long as one focusses on the rightmost points of the tail distribution.
To clarify: