Global warming and the Singularity
Last night I made a serious strategic error: I dared to suggest to some Less Wrongers that unFriendly transcendent AI was not the most pressing danger facing Humanity.
In particular, I made the following claims:
In particular, I made the following claims:
- That runaway anthropogenic climate change, while unlikely to cause Humanity's extinction, was very likely (with a probability of the order ( Read more... )
"they're already disastrous for millions of the world's poor. (link to Oxfam)"
If we look at the wikipedia list of "preventable" causes of death, we see:
Hypertension 7.8
Smoking 5.0
High cholesterol 3.9
Malnutrition 3.8
Sexually transmitted infections 3.0
Poor diet 2.8
Overweight and obesity 2.5
Physical inactivity 2.0
Alcohol 1.9
Indoor air pollution from solid fuels 1.8
Unsafe water and poor sanitation 1.6
numbers indicate deaths resulting in millions per year.
Most of the people who die in the world die from old age (about 40 million per year), and of those listed by wikipedia as preventable, it seems to me that most death is not the kind that climate change can be held responsible for. The largest disaster, by rather a long way, seems to be Hypertension, followed closely by smoking.
How many deaths is climate change responsible for per year at the moment? Hard to quantify, but probably a lot less than the biggest killers on the list, and an awful lot less than aging.
How will this change over the next 50 years? Climate change will probably kill many people in the third world, more so than now, as well as some in the first world. But it is a question of numbers.
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About 300 thousand. But that's only with - what are we on now? - 0.6 degrees of warming.
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Low-and-middle-income countries
Cause Deaths (millions) % of total deaths
1 Ischaemic heart disease 5·70 11·8%
2 Cerebrovascular disease 4·61 9·5%
3 Lower respiratory infections 3·41 7·0%
4 HIV/AIDS 2·55 5·3%
5 Perinatal conditions 2·49 5·1%
6 Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease 2·38 4·9%
7 Diarrhoeal diseases 1·78 3·7%
8 Tuberculosis 1·59 3·3%
9 Malaria 1·21 2·5%
10 Road traffic accidents 1·07 2·2%
High-income countries
Cause Deaths (millions) % of total deaths
1 Ischaemic heart disease 1·36 17·3%
2 Cerebrovascular disease 0·78 9·9%
3 Trachea, bronchus, lung cancers 0·46 5·8%
4 Lower respiratory infections 0·34 4·4%
5 Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease 0·30 3·8%
6 Colon and rectum cancers 0·26 3·3%
7 Alzheimer's disease and other dementias 0·21 2·6%
8 Diabetes mellitus 0·20 2·6%
9 Breast cancer 0·16 2·0%
10 Stomach cancer 0·15 1·9%
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A lot of this argument seems to hinge on whether deaths through aging are preventable, which (from my less-than-complete reading of Less Wrong) appears to depend largely on whether you think Friendly superintelligence is achievable. If, like me, you estimate transhuman AI as very unlikely to be invented in the time-frame under discussion (and large-scale cryopreservation to be both politically untenable and probably useless), then the 2bn or so deaths through aging that will occur between now and 2060 are not preventable and can be ignored for an expected-utility calculation.
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This is of course wrong, and should be replaced with a more precise mathematical statement. Consider this comment as a placeholder for that statement.
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< SARCASM >
- for example, you could replace it with "however low a probability I need to assign to the FAI scenario such that I can ignore it in my expected utility calculation, I'll assign a probability that low".
If it turned out that the FAI scenario entails (according to Bostrom http://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html ) the creation of 10^25 valuable human lives per century in our solar system, then I'll assign a probability of 10^-20 to it so that it generates an expected utility that is not significant compared to climate change damage.
< /SARCASM >
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