However, in reality, instead of doomsday being some fixed point of time on the horizon that we know about, all the best-calibrated experts have is probability distribution smeared over a wide range of times, mostly sitting on “never” simply for the purposes of just taking the median time not working.
And yet! The doomsday clock, so evocative! And I would like to make a bot that counts down on Twitter, I would like to post vivid headlines to really get the blood flowing. (The Twitter bot question is in fact what prompted me to start thinking about this.)
Some thoughts on ways to do this in an almost-honest way:
Find the instantaneous probability, today. Convert this to a timescale until disaster. If there is a 0.1% chance of a nuclear war this year, then this is sort of like there being 1,000 years until doom. Adjust the clock with the probability each year. Drawback is that this both understates and overstates the urgency: there’s a good chance disaster will never happen once the acute period is over, but if it does happen it will be much sooner than 100 years. This is what the Doomsday clock seems to want to do, though I think it’s just a political signalling tool for the most part.
Make a conditional clock. If an AI catastrophe happens in the next century (11% chance), it will on average happen in 2056 (50% CI: 2040 − 2069), so have the clock tick down until that date. Display both the probability and the timer prominently, of course, as to not mislead. Drawback is that this is far too complicated and real clocks don’t only exist with 1⁄10 probability. This is what I would do if I was in charge of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Make a countdown instead to the predicted date of an evocative milestone strongly associated with acute risk, like the attainment of human level AI or the first time a superbug is engineered in a biotech lab. Drawback is that this will be interpreted as a countdown until doomsday approximately two reblogs in (one if I’m careless in phrasing), and everyone will laugh at me when the date passes and the end of the world has not yet happened. This is the thing everyone is ascribing to AOC on Twitter.
Nowadays I would not be so quick to say that existential risk probability is mostly sitting on “never” 😔. This does open up an additional way to make a clock, literally just tick down to the median (which would be somewhere in the acute risk period).
One way that x-risk outreach is done outside of EA is by evoking the image of some sort of countdown to doom. There are 12 years until climate catastrophe. There are two minutes on the Doomsday clock, etc.
However, in reality, instead of doomsday being some fixed point of time on the horizon that we know about, all the best-calibrated experts have is probability distribution smeared over a wide range of times, mostly sitting on “never” simply for the purposes of just taking the median time not working.
And yet! The doomsday clock, so evocative! And I would like to make a bot that counts down on Twitter, I would like to post vivid headlines to really get the blood flowing. (The Twitter bot question is in fact what prompted me to start thinking about this.)
Some thoughts on ways to do this in an almost-honest way:
Find the instantaneous probability, today. Convert this to a timescale until disaster. If there is a 0.1% chance of a nuclear war this year, then this is sort of like there being 1,000 years until doom. Adjust the clock with the probability each year. Drawback is that this both understates and overstates the urgency: there’s a good chance disaster will never happen once the acute period is over, but if it does happen it will be much sooner than 100 years. This is what the Doomsday clock seems to want to do, though I think it’s just a political signalling tool for the most part.
Make a conditional clock. If an AI catastrophe happens in the next century (11% chance), it will on average happen in 2056 (50% CI: 2040 − 2069), so have the clock tick down until that date. Display both the probability and the timer prominently, of course, as to not mislead. Drawback is that this is far too complicated and real clocks don’t only exist with 1⁄10 probability. This is what I would do if I was in charge of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Make a countdown instead to the predicted date of an evocative milestone strongly associated with acute risk, like the attainment of human level AI or the first time a superbug is engineered in a biotech lab. Drawback is that this will be interpreted as a countdown until doomsday approximately two reblogs in (one if I’m careless in phrasing), and everyone will laugh at me when the date passes and the end of the world has not yet happened. This is the thing everyone is ascribing to AOC on Twitter.
Nowadays I would not be so quick to say that existential risk probability is mostly sitting on “never” 😔. This does open up an additional way to make a clock, literally just tick down to the median (which would be somewhere in the acute risk period).