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comment by James_Miller · 2016-10-15T19:18:08.012Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In ten years what's the probability that a CRISPR-competent terrorist group could exterminate mankind? The optimal consequentialist anti-terrorist policies if this answer is >1% should horrify a deontologicalist.

Replies from: woodchopper, entirelyuseless
comment by woodchopper · 2016-10-26T03:21:54.574Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Extremely low. I have never believed any sort of pathogen could come close to wiping us out. They can be defeated by basic breather and biohazard technology. But the main key is that with improved and more accessible biotechnology, our ability to create vaccines and other defence mechanisms against pathogens is greatly enhanced. I actually think the better biotechnology gets, the less likely any pathogen is to wipe us out, even given the fact that terrorists will be able to misuse it more easily.

Replies from: James_Miller
comment by James_Miller · 2016-10-26T04:07:01.296Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I hope you are right.

Replies from: woodchopper
comment by woodchopper · 2016-10-26T10:19:16.202Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Remember also that viruses that kill lots of people tend to rapidly mutate into less lethal strains due to evolutionary pressures. This is what happened with the 1917 pandemic.

Replies from: James_Miller
comment by James_Miller · 2016-10-26T15:36:31.513Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes, but evolutionary pressures wouldn't be shaping bioterrorism created viruses in the short run. Also, until we can cure the common cold what's to prevent terrorists (in 10 years with CRISPR) from making a cold virus that's much more virulent, that stays hidden for a few months, and then kills its host.

comment by entirelyuseless · 2016-10-15T20:36:18.771Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Indeed. And since all humans are deontologists by nature, it should horrify everyone, and would.

comment by turchin · 2016-10-16T10:05:22.032Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In 20 century most risks were created by superpowers. Should we include them in the list of potential agents?

Also it seems that some risks are non-agential, as they result from collective behaviors of a group of agents, like arms race, capitalism, resource depletion, overpopulation etc.

Replies from: philosophytorres
comment by philosophytorres · 2016-10-20T20:06:02.303Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Totally agree that some x-risks are non-agential, such as (a) risks from nature, and (b) risks produced by coordination problems, resulting in e.g. climate change and biodiversity loss. As for superpowers, I would classify them as (7). Thoughts? Any further suggestions? :-)

Replies from: turchin, turchin
comment by turchin · 2016-10-20T21:00:44.017Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"Rogue country" is outside evaluative characteristic.

Lets try to define "rogue country" by its estimation-independent characteristics: 1) It is country which fight for world domination 2) It is a country which is interested in worldwide promotion of its (crazy) ideology (USSR, communism) 3) Its a country which survival is threatened by risks of aggression 4) It is a country which is ruled by crazy dictator.

I would like to say that superpowers is the type of "rogue countries", as they sometimes combine some of listed above properties.

The difference is mainly that we always had two (or three) superpowers which fight for the world domination. Sometimes one of them was on the first place and another one was challenging its position as world leader. The second superpower is more willing to create global risk, as it may rise it "status" or chances to overpower "alpha-superpower".

The topic is interesting, and there a lot what could be said on it including current political situation and even war in Syria. Just read an article today which explained this war from this point of view.

comment by turchin · 2016-10-20T20:39:31.420Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I would also add Doomsday blackmailers. These are rational agents which would create Doomsday Machine to blackmail the world with the goal of world domination.

Another option worth considering is arogant scientists, who benefit personally from dangerous experiments. Example is CERN proceeded with LHC before its safety was proven. Another group of bioscientists excavated 1918 pandemic flu, sequenced it and posted it in the internet. And another scientist deliberately created new superflu studying genetic variation which could make birds flu stronger. We could imagine a scientist who would to increase personal longevity by gene therapy, even if it poses 1 per cent pandemic risk. And if there are many of them...

Also there is a possible class of agents who try to create smaller catastrophe in order to prevent larger catastrophe. Recent movie "Inferno" is about it, where a character created a virus to kill half humanity to safe all humanity later.

I listed all my ideas in my agent map, which is here on Less Wrong http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/o0m/the_map_of_agents_which_may_create_xrisks/

comment by SithLord13 · 2016-10-15T23:25:12.166Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Furthermore, implementing stricter regulations on CO2 emissions could decrease the probability of extreme ecoterrorism and/or apocalyptic terrorism, since environmental degradation is a “trigger” for both.

Disregarding any discussion of legitimate climate concerns, isn't this a really bad decision? Isn't it better to be unblackmailable, to disincentivize blackmail.

Replies from: philosophytorres
comment by philosophytorres · 2016-10-20T20:08:23.590Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What do you mean? How is mitigating climate change related to blackmail?

Replies from: SithLord13
comment by SithLord13 · 2016-10-21T08:54:27.322Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This discussion was about agential risks, the part I quoted was talking about extreme ecoterrorism as a result of environmental degradation. In other words, the main post was partially about stricter regulations on CO2 as a means of minimizing the risk of a potential doomsday scenario from an anti global warming group.

comment by hg00 · 2016-10-17T09:03:50.493Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Good post!

While not all sociopaths are violent, a disproportionate number of criminals and dictators have (or very likely have) had the condition.

Luckily sociopaths tend to have poor impulse control.

It follows that some radical environmentalists in the future could attempt to use technology to cause human extinction, thereby “solving” the environmental crisis.

Reminds me of Derrick Jensen. He doesn't talk about human extinction, but he does talk about bringing down civilization.

Fortunately, this version of negative utilitarianism is not a position that many non-academics tend to hold, and even among academic philosophers it is not especially widespread.

For details see http://www.amirrorclear.net/academic/ideas/negative-utilitarianism/

This is worrisome because recent research shows that even slight misalignments between our values and those motivating a superintelligence could have existentially catastrophic consequences.

Citation? This is commonly asserted by AI risk proponents, but I'm not sure I believe it. My best friend's values are slightly misaligned relative to my own, but if my best friend became superintelligent, that seems to me like it'd be a pretty good outcome.

Replies from: SithLord13
comment by SithLord13 · 2016-10-17T12:10:19.399Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Citation? This is commonly asserted by AI risk proponents, but I'm not sure I believe it. My best friend's values are slightly misaligned relative to my own, but if my best friend became superintelligent, that seems to me like it'd be a pretty good outcome.

I highly recommend reading this.

Replies from: hg00
comment by hg00 · 2016-10-17T22:25:59.535Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm familiar with lots of the things Eliezer Yudkowsky has said about AI. That doesn't mean I agree with them. Less Wrong has an unfortunate culture of not discussing topics once the Great Teacher has made a pronouncement.

Plus, I don't think philosophytorres' claim is obvious even if you accept Yudkowsky's arguments.

Fragility of value thesis. Getting a goal system 90% right does not give you 90% of the value, any more than correctly dialing 9 out of 10 digits of my phone number will connect you to somebody who’s 90% similar to Eliezer Yudkowsky. There are multiple dimensions for which eliminating that dimension of value would eliminate almost all value from the future. For example an alien species which shared almost all of human value except that their parameter setting for “boredom” was much lower, might devote most of their computational power to replaying a single peak, optimal experience over and over again with slightly different pixel colors (or the equivalent thereof). Friendly AI is more like a satisficing threshold than something where we’re trying to eke out successive 10% improvements. See: Yudkowsky (2009, 2011).

From here.

OK, so do my best friend's values constitute a 90% match? A 99.9% match? Do they pass the satisficing threshold?

Also, Eliezer's boredom-free scenario sounds like a pretty good outcome to me, all things considered. If an AGI modified me so I could no longer get bored, and then replayed a peak experience for me for millions of years, I'd consider that a positive singularity. Certainly not a "catastrophe" in the sense that an earthquake is a catastrophe. (Well, perhaps a catastrophe of opportunity cost, but basically every outcome is a catastrophe of opportunity cost on a long enough timescale, so that's not a very interesting objection.) The utility function is not up for grabs--I am the expert on my values, not the Great Teacher.

Here's the abstract from his 2011 paper:

A common reaction to first encountering the problem statement of Friendly AI (“Ensure that the creation of a generally intelligent, self-improving, eventually superintelligent system realizes a positive outcome”) is to propose a single moral value which allegedly suffices; or to reject the problem by replying that “constraining” our creations is undesirable or unnecessary. This paper makes the case that a criterion for describing a “positive outcome,” despite the shortness of the English phrase, contains considerable complexity hidden from us by our own thought processes, which only search positive-value parts of the action space, and implicitly think as if code is interpreted by an anthropomorphic ghost-in-the-machine. Abandoning inheritance from human value (at least as a basis for renormalizing to reflective equilibria) will yield futures worthless even from the standpoint of AGI researchers who consider themselves to have cosmopolitan values not tied to the exact forms or desires of humanity.

It sounds to me like Eliezer's point is more about the complexity of values, not the need to prevent slight misalignment. In other words, Eliezer seems to argue here that a naively programmed definition of "positive value" constitutes a gross misalignment, NOT that a slight misalignment constitutes a catastrophic outcome.

Please think critically.

Replies from: turchin
comment by turchin · 2016-10-20T22:42:02.000Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think that small error inside a value description could result in bad result, but it is not so, if we have a list of independent values.

In phone example if I lose one digit from someone number, I will not get 90 per cent of him, but if I lose 1 phone number from my phone book, it will be 90 per cent intact.

Humans tend to have many somewhat independent values, like some may like fishing, snorkeling, girls, clouds, etc. If he lost one of them it is not a big deal, it is almost him and it happens all the time with real humans, as their predispositions could change overnight.

comment by WhySpace_duplicate0.9261692129075527 · 2016-10-16T04:52:51.484Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Awesome article! I do have a small piece of feedback to offer, though.

Interestingly, no notable historical group has combined both the genocidal and suicidal urges.

No historical group has combined both genocidal and suicidal actions, but that may be because of technological constraints. If we had had nukes widely available for millennia, how many groups do you think would have blown up their own cities?

Without sufficiently destructive technology, it takes a lot more time and effort to completely wipe out large groups of people. Usually some of them survive, and there's a bloody feud for the next 10 generations. It's rare to win sufficiently thoroughly that the group can then commit mass suicide without the culture they attempted genocide against coming back in a generation or two.

There have, of course, been plenty of groups willing to fight to the death. How many of them would have pressed a domesday button if they could?

Replies from: philosophytorres
comment by philosophytorres · 2016-10-20T20:07:56.495Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I actually think most historical groups wanted to vanquish the enemy, but not destroy either themselves or the environment to the point at which it's no longer livable. This is one of the interesting things that shifts to the foreground when thinking about agents in the context of existential risks. As for people fighting to the death, often this was done for the sake of group survival, where the group is the relevant unit here. (Thoughts?)

comment by philosophytorres · 2016-10-20T20:02:50.556Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think my language could have been more precise: it's not merely genocidal, but humanicidal or omnicidal that we're talking about in the context of x-risks. Also, Khmer Rough wasn't suicidal to my knowledge. Am I less right?

comment by philosophytorres · 2016-10-20T20:04:53.237Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

(2) is quite different in that it isn't motivated by supernatural eschatologies. Thus, the ideological and psychological profiles of ecoterrorists are quite different than apocalyptic terrorists, which are bound together by certain common worldview-related threads.

comment by turchin · 2016-10-15T21:04:22.555Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What do you think about how the number of potentially dangerous agents change in time?

Replies from: philosophytorres
comment by philosophytorres · 2016-10-16T00:20:14.416Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Great question. I think there are strong reasons for anticipating the total number of apocalyptic terrorists and ecoterrorists to nontrivially increase in the future. I've written two papers on the former, linked below. There's weaker evidence to suggest that environmental instability will exacerbate conflicts in general, and consequently produce more malicious agents with idiosyncratic motives. As for the others -- not sure! I suspect we'll have at least one superintelligence around by the end of the century.

Replies from: turchin
comment by turchin · 2016-10-16T10:01:50.550Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think that number of agents will also grow as technologies will be more accessible for smaller organisations and even individuals. If a teenager could create dangerous biovirus as simply as he now able to write computer virus to amuse his friends, we are certainly doomed.

comment by John_Maxwell (John_Maxwell_IV) · 2016-12-22T12:18:57.772Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If bonobo type civilizations have already been Great Filtered, that suggests helping humans get along better may not be a feasible strategy for subverting the filter ourselves.

comment by ChristianKl · 2016-10-16T20:53:32.423Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

For example, if North Korea were to overcome the world’s superpowers through a sudden preemptive attack and implement a one-world government, the result could be an irreversible decline in our quality of life.

I'm not sure how such a scenario would look like or whether it makes sense. A North Korea that has the power to rule other countries would look very different then the one we have.

comment by morganism · 2016-10-15T21:51:22.643Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Natural risk, these folks say 100% prob that universe is cyclic, and a collapse will come.

"They first used Jacobson's formalism of Einstein's general theory of relativity, where the Einstein equation is basically described as thermodynamical equation. They then studied the corrections to the Einstein equations from quantum effects."

" In fact, we are able to analyze the pre Big Bang state of the Universe. Furthermore, the equations imply that the expansion of the Universe will come to a halt and then will immediately be followed by a contracting phase. When the equations are extrapolated beyond the maximum rate of contraction, a cyclic Universe scenario emerges."

https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00560

Does this hypothesis rule out the simulation argument?

and another for the natural xrisks map odds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%27s_Cloud

http://www.nature.com/news/meteorites-pummel-the-moon-far-more-than-expected-1.20777