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Andrew Bosworth, one of Facebook’s longtime executives, has compared Facebook to sugar—in that it is “delicious” but best enjoyed in moderation. In a memo originally posted to Facebook’s internal network last year, he argued for a philosophy of personal responsibility. “My grandfather took such a stance towards bacon and I admired him for it,” Bosworth wrote. “And social media is likely much less fatal than bacon.” But viewing Facebook merely as a vehicle for individual consumption ignores the fact of what it is—a network. Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene? I still believe the internet is good for humanity, but that’s despite the social web, not because of it. We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago. The unconditioned n distribution of the current population is identical to the vague prior N probability density function, [note 1] so: Reasonable pessimism is allowed so long as it doesn’t get too bad. Spamming this subreddit with articles and comments about why we’re all going to die would be a good example of “too bad”. Also please don’t call humans a “virus” or a cancer and then ask for a new plague.
Find sources: "Doomsday argument"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( August 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Why didn't they change it in the Cuban Missile Crisis?” Wellerstein says. “Well, because it was one guy, and also the Cuban Missile Crisis happened before they had a chance to update it.” Nobody is pining for megadeath. But megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable. Since Gott specifies the prior distribution of total humans, P(N), Bayes' theorem and the principle of indifference alone give us P(N|n), the probability of N humans being born if n is a random draw from N: Kahn and his colleagues helped invent modern futurism, which was born of the existential dread that the bomb ushered in, and hardened by the understanding that most innovation is horizontal in nature—a copy of what already exists, rather than wholly new. Real invention is extraordinarily rare, and far more disruptive.
WHERE TO FIND THE BOOK "DOOMSDAY DEBUNKED"
Note that as remarked above, this argument assumes that the prior probability for N is flat, or 50% for N 1 and 50% for N 2 in the absence of any information about X. On the other hand, it is possible to conclude, given X, that N 2 is more likely than N 1 if a different prior is used for N. More precisely, Bayes' theorem tells us that P( N| X) = P( X| N)P( N)/P( X), and the conservative application of the Copernican principle tells us only how to calculate P( X| N). Taking P( X) to be flat, we still have to make an assumption about the prior probability P( N) that the total number of humans is N. If we conclude that N 2 is much more likely than N 1 (for example, because producing a larger population takes more time, increasing the chance that a low probability but cataclysmic natural event will take place in that time), then P( X| N) can become more heavily weighted towards the bigger value of N. A further, more detailed discussion, as well as relevant distributions P( N), are given below in the Rebuttals section. If you need to motivate people to act to prevent disaster, it may be preferable to find a way to move those who are aware and flirting with fatalism rather than reach many who have no clue of the dangers.
Assume, for simplicity, that the total number of humans who will ever be born is 60 billion ( N 1), or 6,000 billion ( N 2). [6] If there is no prior knowledge of the position that a currently living individual, X, has in the history of humanity, one may instead compute how many humans were born before X, and arrive at say 59,854,795,447, which would roughly place X among the first 60 billion humans who have ever lived. [ citation needed] If Leslie's figure [5] is used, then approximately 60 billion humans have been born so far, so it can be estimated that there is a 95% chance that the total number of humans N {\textstyle N} will be less than 20 × {\textstyle \times } 60 billion = 1.2 trillion. Assuming that the world population stabilizes at 10 billion and a life expectancy of 80 years, it can be estimated that the remaining 1140 billion humans will be born in 9120 years. Depending on the projection of the world population in the forthcoming centuries, estimates may vary, but the argument states that it is unlikely that more than 1.2 trillion humans will ever live. It is possible to sum the probabilities for each value of N and, therefore, to compute a statistical 'confidence limit' on N. For example, taking the numbers above, it is 99% certain that N is smaller than 6 trillion. These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people. Facebook has conducted social-contagion experiments on its users without telling them. Facebook has acted as a force for digital colonialism, attempting to become the de facto (and only) experience of the internet for people all over the world. Facebook has bragged about its ability to influence the outcome of elections. Unlawful militant groups use Facebook to organize. Government officials use Facebook to mislead their own citizens, and to tamper with elections. Military officials have exploited Facebook’s complacency to carry out genocide. Facebook inadvertently auto-generated jaunty recruitment videos for the Islamic State featuring anti-Semitic messages and burning American flags.
HUMAN EXTINCTION OR COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION
The on-again, off-again Facebook executive Chris Cox once talked about the “magic number” for start-ups, and how after a company surpasses 150 employees, things go sideways. “I’ve talked to so many start-up CEOs that after they pass this number, weird stuff starts to happen,” he said at a conference in 2016. This idea comes from the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who argued that 148 is the maximum number of stable social connections a person can maintain. If we were to apply that same logic to the stability of a social platform, what number would we find? In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing.” Another expert in this realm, Mary McCord, the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches tons of people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.
P ( N ≤ Z ) = ∫ N = n N = Z P ( N | n ) d N {\displaystyle P(N\leq Z)=\int _{N=n} In a nutshell, r/debunking doomsday is a science and reason based subreddit for people who have a more optimistic take on the future of humanity and don’t believe that we’ll all be dead or facing civilizations collapse within the next decade. Any challenges that represent a potential “doomsday” scenario for humanity are open for discussion. These things range from climate change and it’s effects, to geopolitical events such as the Iran crisis which some genuinely feared would cause WW3. One of these organizations, the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, had created a sort of small newspaper/magazine called The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of Chicago, which became The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as it became sort of more prominent,” Wellerstein tells Inverse. Kahn concluded that automating the extinction of all life on Earth would be immoral. Even an infinitesimal risk of error is too great to justify the Doomsday Machine’s existence. “And even if we give up the computer and make the Doomsday Machine reliably controllable by decision makers,” Kahn wrote, “it is still not controllable enough.” No machine should be that powerful by itself—but no one person should be either. It’s not just the risk of a US-USSR nuclear exchange anymore, Zimmer points out, though the war in Ukraine has certainly reignited that possibility. Nuclear weapons have proliferated into more hands, very little of practical value has been done to even begin to arrest climate change in time to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, “and perhaps most dispiritingly, after the millions of lives lost and epochal disruption to daily life caused by Covid, astonishingly few resources are being allocated for future preparedness for a naturally occurring pandemic,” he says.
The logician and philosopher Olaf Helmer-Hirschberg, who overlapped with Kahn at Rand and would later co-found the Institute for the Future, arrived in California after having fled the Nazis, an experience that gave his desire to peer into the future a particular kind of urgency. He argued that the acceleration of technological change had established the need for a new epistemological approach to fields such as engineering, medicine, the social sciences, and so on. “No longer does it take generations for a new pattern of living conditions to evolve,” he wrote, “but we are going through several major adjustments in our lives, and our children will have to adopt continual adaptation as a way of life.” In 1965, he wrote a book called Social Technology that aimed to create a scientific methodology for predicting the future. This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources.
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