There’s an implied assumption that when you lose parts of society through a bottleneck that you can always recreate them with high fidelity. It seems plausible that some bottleneck events could “limit humanity’s potential”, since choices may rely on those lost values, and not all choices are exchangeable in time. (This has connections both to the long reflection and to the rich shaping the world in their own image).
As an aside, the bottleneck paper you’re referring to is pretty contentious. I personally find it unlikely that no other demographic model detects a bottleneck of >0.99 in the real data, but all of them can do it on simulated data. If such an event did occur in the modern day, the effects would be profound and serious.
There’s an implied assumption that when you lose parts of society through a bottleneck that you can always recreate them with high fidelity.
I do think this assumption will become more true in the 21st century, and indeed AI and robotics progress making the assumption more true is the main reason that if a catastrophe happens, this is how it happens.
Re the bottleneck paper, I’m not going to comment any further, since I just wanted to provide an example.
There’s an implied assumption that when you lose parts of society through a bottleneck that you can always recreate them with high fidelity. It seems plausible that some bottleneck events could “limit humanity’s potential”, since choices may rely on those lost values, and not all choices are exchangeable in time. (This has connections both to the long reflection and to the rich shaping the world in their own image).
As an aside, the bottleneck paper you’re referring to is pretty contentious. I personally find it unlikely that no other demographic model detects a bottleneck of >0.99 in the real data, but all of them can do it on simulated data. If such an event did occur in the modern day, the effects would be profound and serious.
I do think this assumption will become more true in the 21st century, and indeed AI and robotics progress making the assumption more true is the main reason that if a catastrophe happens, this is how it happens.
Re the bottleneck paper, I’m not going to comment any further, since I just wanted to provide an example.