Rob Wiblin: prediction

Transcript context

…I think we underinvest in particular kinds of social science. Too many social scientists are overly specialized. They don’t read outside their disciplines. They don’t have the incentives to do something the world, as a whole, will find useful. Tetlock is a wonderful, shining counterexample to that. Academic incentives are working less well than I think they did 20, 30 years ago, including in the social sciences, and that we need to fix. It will be very hard to do because existing structures are tightly locked in. Let’s take a step back in time, back to 1900. I imagine that, if you were alive then, you would say that the risk of human extinction in the next hundred years would be fairly low. But then in the ’40s, we had the shock where we developed nuclear weapons, and suddenly, I think we would both agree, the risk of human extinction or the collapse of civilization went up quite substantially because, for the first time, we had the ability for one person or one country to basically wipe out most humans alive at the time. What do you think are the chances that, in the 21st century, there’ll be some new breakthrough that’s analogous to nuclear weapons that will, again, give a level-shifting annual risk of human extinction? The possibility that worries me the most is simply an equivalent amount of power being more portable. I don’t think it has to be a new technology. It certainly might be, but simply the cost of a nuclear weapon or something like it being much cheaper. Bio weapons — they’re very hard to carry around and deploy, but you can quite readily imagine that becoming easier. It seems to me those are likely outcomes. But terrorism in general, I don’t think we understand well, so after 9/11, people thought there would be many more attacks. You could ask questions, “Why don’t they just send a few people over the Mexican border? They get here, they buy submachine guns, they show up in a famous shopping mall and they take out 17 people. They don’t get any further than that, but it’s a massive publicity event. And this just happens every two or three weeks.” A priori, it almost sounds plausible, but nothing like that has happened. If anyone has done that, it’s our native, white Americans who are not, in the traditional sense, terrorists. It’s clearly possible, but they don’t do it. So when you ask, how likely is someone to do something pretty horrible with a pretty cheap decentralized, highly destructive technology? We don’t even see them acting at the current frontier of destructiveness. What you need in terms of people who are competent enough, motivated enough, coherent enough, have a base to operate from. How hard is it in a combinatorial sense for all those to come together? We don’t know, but I think thinking about it more, you become a little more optimistic rather than less.…

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