I recall once seeing someone say with 99.9% probability that the sun would still rise 100 million years from now, citing information about the life-cycle of stars like our sun. Someone else pointed out that this was clearly wrong, that by default that sun would be taken apart for fuel on that time scale, by us or some AI, and that this was a lesson in people’s predictions about the future being highly inaccurate.
But also, “the thing that means there won’t be a sun sometime soon” is one of the things I’m pointing to when talking about “general intelligence”. This post reminded me of that.
I recall once seeing someone say with 99.9% probability that the sun would still rise 100 million years from now, citing information about the life-cycle of stars like our sun. Someone else pointed out that this was clearly wrong, that by default that sun would be taken apart for fuel on that time scale, by us or some AI, and that this was a lesson in people’s predictions about the future being highly inaccurate.
But also, “the thing that means there won’t be a sun sometime soon” is one of the things I’m pointing to when talking about “general intelligence”. This post reminded me of that.