But What Would the End of Humanity Mean for Me?

[bananas]

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/but-what-does-the-end-of-humanity-mean-for-me/361931/

But What Would the End of Humanity Mean for Me?

Preeminent scientists are warning about serious threats to human life in the not-distant future, including climate change and superintelligent computers. Most people don't care.

James Hamblin May 9 2014, 2:55 PM ET

<snip>

"I am finding it increasingly plausible that existential risk is the biggest moral issue in the world, even if it hasn’t gone mainstream yet," Bostrom told Ross Andersen recently in an amazing profile in Aeon. Bostrom, along with Hawking, is an advisor to the recently-established Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University, and to Tegmark’s new analogous group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Future of Life Institute, which has a launch event later this month. Existential risks, as Tegmark describes them, are things that are “not just a little bit bad, like a parking ticket, but really bad. Things that could really mess up or wipe out human civilization.”

<snip>

Tegmark told Lex Berko at Motherboard earlier this year, "I would guess there’s about a 60 percent chance that I’m not going to die of old age, but from some kind of human-caused calamity. Which would suggest that I should spend a significant portion of my time actually worrying about this. We should in society, too."

I really wanted to know what all of this means in more concrete terms, so I asked Tegmark about it myself.

<snip>

"This is very near-term stuff. Anyone who’s thinking about what their kids should study in high school or college should care a lot about this.”

<snip>

But how do you put this into people’s day-to-day lives to encourage the right kind of awareness? Buying a stroller is an immediate decision, and you can tell people to buy a sturdy stroller. What are the concrete things to do or advocate for or protest in terms of existential risks?

<sip>

But in the end of our conversation, all of this concern took a turn. “The reason we call it The Future of Life Institute and not the Existential Risk Institute is we want to emphasize the positive,” Tegmark said, kind of strikingly at odds with most of what I’d read and heard so far.

<snip>

[shenmue]

1. Cool, I can finally afford an apartment

I won't have to work anymore, and I'll be able to take all the food! Yay!

[RobertEarl]

2. Humans will suvive

This society, tho, is probably gonna blow its brains out. It has almost happened already. Nukes came close to being launched more than once. Many are are still ready to go.

And all that nuke waste?

Einstein said it best... he didn't know how ww3 would start, but he said, ww4 would start with rocks and spears.

Live, love and laugh. The only goods you take with you when you leave this life are do goods, be goods and feel goods.

[Louisiana1976]

3. If I were the last person left on Earth I'd move into my neighborhood library to live.

[longship]

5. Time at last!

Just keep an extra pair of glasses with you. Just in case.

[longship]

4. Here we go, down The Matrix wet dream rabbit hole.

I blame Ray Kurzweil for this, the first down that rabbit hole (meanwhile megadosing on "supplements" which ironically may probably end up killing him).

Kurzweil is apparently doing this because he is afraid of dying. (You can take his 9 week course on the singularity for a mere $25,000 and learn about it.)

I am very skeptical of smart people making predictions like this. They generally overstate long-term projections -- where's my nuclear powered vacuum sweeper and my flying car/hovercraft (the latter's probably full of eels) -- and understate shorter projections.

And here's the deal... The domains where the predict large advances will likely not see them. Fusion energy has been right around the corner since my Jr. High School years in the very early 60's. But nobody saw the Internet coming.

It's the quirkiness of these things that makes me not lose too much sleep about them.

I really like these guys -- well, all but Kurzweil. I just sincerely hope that they all don't go down the Matrix wet dream rabbit hole with him.

[Fumesucker]

6. Asimov saw the Internet coming in 1951

It was a throwaway line in his story "Hostess" where a character researches something on a worldwide electronic information network.

http://bookre.org/reader?file=192891&pg=1

[longship]

8. But Asimov was not a kook.

Compare Kurzweil... KOOK!

I stand corrected on the Internet thing.

[Fumesucker]

9. Your words verbatim

But nobody saw the Internet coming.

That's what I was replying to.

[longship]

10. I made an edit. Sorry.

[Fumesucker]

11. It's all good..

I just reviewed a list of Asimov stories, he had at least one for every single letter of the alphabet and dozens for some of them.

Sometimes it's hard to tell genius from kookdom.

[pscot]

7. Derp

[AverageJoe90]

12. One of the reasons many people don't care is because.....

They've been fed WAY too much fucking fearmongering by the Press(cycling between that and the "skeptics", of course), and not enough focusing on the actual science.....at least when it comes to AGW, anyway.