Do you have a sense for the size of the threat that Y2K presented?
Doris Lessing’s “Report on the Threatened City” (I found it unreadable, so this is not a recommendation) points out that Californians live with the constant threat of a major earthquake. A big enough quake could kill millions, although a quake of that magnitude would be rather infrequent. In general, seismic, volcanic, and weather events are a matter of when, not whether, so perhaps this is not quite in the right reference class.
Building regulations may count, though I think that the historical precedent somewhat frequent large earthquakes in California makes the case disanalogous to the issue of AI risk, which involves an event that has never happened before.
Albania spent billions of dollars on useless bunkers in case of an invasion.
Can you give a reference? Who did they anticipate potential invasion from?
Do you have a sense for the size of the threat that Y2K presented?
Building regulations may count, though I think that the historical precedent somewhat frequent large earthquakes in California makes the case disanalogous to the issue of AI risk, which involves an event that has never happened before.
Can you give a reference? Who did they anticipate potential invasion from?
Some competing cost estimates. I tend towards the “fix it when it fails” side of things, but that is a tendency not a rule.
And a related issue
Bunkers—invasion from the US or the USSR; cost was twice the Maginot Line, which Wikipedia elsewhere describes as 3 billion French Francs.
this is the conversion to 2012 Euros
Great! Thanks.