#Fallout 76 rating common sense media how to#
It’s reasonable to assume that if we found out a giant asteroid were going to crash into the Earth one year from now, most of our resources would be quickly diverted into figuring out how to avert catastrophe.īut even in the case of COVID-19, an event that massively disrupted the lives of everyone on Earth, we’ve still seen a substantial lack of investment in vaccine manufacturing capacity and other ways of controlling the spread of the virus, relative to what economists recommended.Ĭarl expects that all the reasons we didn’t adequately prepare for or respond to COVID-19 - with excess mortality over 15 million and costs well over $10 trillion - bite even harder when it comes to threats we’ve never faced before, such as engineered pandemics, risks from advanced artificial intelligence, and so on. If the public doesn’t know what good performance looks like, politicians can’t be given incentives to do the right thing. Of course the annual probability of a disaster was the same the whole time all that changed is what voters had on their minds.Ĭarl suspects another reason is that it’s difficult for the average voter to estimate and understand how large these respective risks are, and what responses would be appropriate rather than self-serving. Research indicates that extra money is spent on flood defences in the years immediately following a massive flood - but as memories fade, that spending quickly dries up. If the case is clear enough, why hasn’t it already motivated a lot more spending or regulations to limit existential risks - enough to drive down what any additional efforts would achieve?Ĭarl thinks that one key barrier is that infrequent disasters are rarely politically salient. This argument helped NASA get funding to scan the sky for any asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth, and it was directly promoted by famous economists like Richard Posner, Larry Summers, and Cass Sunstein. So it easily passes a government cost-benefit test, with a very big benefit-to-cost ratio - likely over 1000:1 today. Carl thinks it would cost a lot less than that to achieve a 1% risk reduction if the money were spent intelligently.If you believe that the risk of human extinction over the next century is something like one in six (as Toby Ord suggests is a reasonable figure in his book The Precipice), then it would be worth the US government spending up to $2.2 trillion to reduce that risk by just 1%, in terms of American lives saved alone.So saving all US citizens at any given point in time would be worth $1,300 trillion.The US government is willing to pay up to $4 million (depending on the agency) to save the life of an American.A back-of-the-envelope version of the argument runs: That is, the risk of a disaster that kills billions of people alive today is alarmingly high, and it can be reduced at a reasonable cost. The key reason to make it a top priority is factual, not philosophical. Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to become a galaxy-spanning civilisation.īut the policy of US government agencies is already to spend up to $4 million to save the life of a citizen, making the death of all Americans a $1,300,000,000,000,000 disaster.Īccording to Carl Shulman, research associate at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, that means you don’t need any fancy philosophical arguments about the value or size of the future to justify working to reduce existential risk - it passes a mundane cost-benefit analysis whether or not you place any value on the long-term future. And if you ask, “Well, how bad would it be if our civilization was laid waste by an asteroid?” Then you can say, well it’s probably worth more than one year of GDP. On average you’d expect about one in a million centuries there would be a dinosaur killer–scale asteroid impact. 3.25 Strongest argument against this being a really pivotal time.3.24 Technological progress can’t keep up for long.3.21 How hard it would be to convince governments.3.20 Suspicious convergence around x-risk reduction.3.19 False alarms about big risks in the past.3.15 Successes and failures around COVID-19.
3.9 Solutions for asteroids, comets, and supervolcanoes.3.8 How x-risk reduction compares to GiveWell recommendations.3.7 Costs and political incentives around COVID.3.6 International programs to stop asteroids and comets.3.5 Why we don’t adequately prepare for disasters.3.4 Longtermism isn’t necessary for wanting to reduce big x-risks.3.3 A few reasons Carl isn't excited by strong longtermism.2 Articles, books, and other media discussed in the show.
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