Everyone who doesn’t want to have kids (as many as they can, within reason) is both missing a major point of life and complicit in creating a dysgenic society—which, btw, should be included on the list of existential risks.
Could you explain how a dysgenic society could result in 90% of the human population dying by 2100? To me that seems widely overblown.
Sure, dysgenics is unlikely to result in a bang (in this terminology), but it can sure result in a crunch. (Some people have argued that’s already happened in places such as inner-city Detroit.)
Bostrom’s definition of a crunch (“The potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity[7] is permanently thwarted although human life continues in some form”) isn’t coextensive with ChristianKI’s “90% of the human population dying by 2100″, and dysgenics seems far less likely to cause the latter than the former. (I find it still more unlikely that dysgenics was the key cause of Detroit’s decline, given that that happened in ~3 generations.)
I can think of scenarios where dysgenics might kill 90% of humanity by 2100, but only (1) in combination with some other precipitating factor, like if dysgenics meant a vital unfriendly-AI-averting genius were never born, or (2) if dysgenics were deliberately amplified by direct processes like embryo selection.
Bostrom’s definition of a crunch (“The potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity[7] is permanently thwarted although human life continues in some form”) isn’t coextensive with ChristianKI’s “90% of the human population dying by 2100″, and dysgenics seems far less likely to cause the latter than the former.
I agree. I guess that ChristianKl guessed that by “the list of existential risks” baiter meant the one in the survey, but I was charitable to baiter and assumed he meant it in a more abstract sense.
Could you explain how a dysgenic society could result in 90% of the human population dying by 2100? To me that seems widely overblown.
And just plain ridiculous—if it results in 90% of the human population dying, that’s some serious evolutionary pressure right there.
Sure, dysgenics is unlikely to result in a bang (in this terminology), but it can sure result in a crunch. (Some people have argued that’s already happened in places such as inner-city Detroit.)
Bostrom’s definition of a crunch (“The potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity[7] is permanently thwarted although human life continues in some form”) isn’t coextensive with ChristianKI’s “90% of the human population dying by 2100″, and dysgenics seems far less likely to cause the latter than the former. (I find it still more unlikely that dysgenics was the key cause of Detroit’s decline, given that that happened in ~3 generations.)
I can think of scenarios where dysgenics might kill 90% of humanity by 2100, but only (1) in combination with some other precipitating factor, like if dysgenics meant a vital unfriendly-AI-averting genius were never born, or (2) if dysgenics were deliberately amplified by direct processes like embryo selection.
I agree. I guess that ChristianKl guessed that by “the list of existential risks” baiter meant the one in the survey, but I was charitable to baiter and assumed he meant it in a more abstract sense.