I’m having trouble imagining how risk would ever go down, sans entering a machine-run totalitarian state, so I clearly don’t have the same assessment of bad things happening “sooner rather than later”. I can’t imagine a single dangerous activity that is harder or less dangerous now than it was in the past, and I suspect this will continue. The only things that will happen sooner than later are establishing stable and safe equilibria (like post-Cold War nuclear politics). If me personally being alive meaningfully effects an equilibrium (implicit or explicit) then Humanity is quite completely screwed.
For one, Yudkowsky in Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and
Negative Factor in Global Risk says that artificial general intelligence could potentially use its super-intelligence to decrease existential risk in ways we haven’t thought of. Additionally, I suspect (though I am rather uninformed on the topic) that Earth-originating life will be much less vulnerable one it spreads away from Earth, as I think many catastrophes would be local to a single planet. I suspect catastrophes from nanotechnology one such catastrophe.
I’m having trouble imagining how risk would ever go down, sans entering a machine-run totalitarian state, so I clearly don’t have the same assessment of bad things happening “sooner rather than later”. I can’t imagine a single dangerous activity that is harder or less dangerous now than it was in the past, and I suspect this will continue. The only things that will happen sooner than later are establishing stable and safe equilibria (like post-Cold War nuclear politics). If me personally being alive meaningfully effects an equilibrium (implicit or explicit) then Humanity is quite completely screwed.
For one, Yudkowsky in Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk says that artificial general intelligence could potentially use its super-intelligence to decrease existential risk in ways we haven’t thought of. Additionally, I suspect (though I am rather uninformed on the topic) that Earth-originating life will be much less vulnerable one it spreads away from Earth, as I think many catastrophes would be local to a single planet. I suspect catastrophes from nanotechnology one such catastrophe.