It’s not particularly obvious that the future is more than, say, a century, and if AI / nukes / bioterrorism were addressed then I’d also probably be 97% on no apocalypse?
if 3% is spent just to be able to work then it goes down from there from being able to make particular achievements. One could ponder on given infinite working time what is the chance that humans have quantum gravity. And its also not about the tech being made but also the current patients being able to benefit from it. No political upheavals or riots that would compromise the bodily safety of millions of patients for centuries or millenia? They think they can figure out resurrection without knowing what principles apply? That is like saying “I will figure antimatter bombs” without knowing what an atom is.
Riots or upheavals which damage the cryonically suspended seems too unlikely to be an issue to dath ilan? And it’s not like the resurrection is going to take new laws of physics, it’s just a very tricky engineering challenge which they’re probably planning to put the AGI on?
Upheavals could include things like a political faction rising that wants to incorporate a new form of punishment of administered True Death. And since they have done it before if they ever need to do a total screening of the past again that is next to impossible to achieve with popsicle relics around. It would probably be a downlooked supervillain but out of the population not one has the explicit goal of sabotaging the cryopatients? The amount of murders that don’t utilise the head removal service is non-zero afterall.
Supernovas or asteroids could make it tricky to keep the lights on. With a couple of centuries passing and no Future having onset the doubt that its going to happen might creep in a little differently. At some point the warm population is going to be tiny compared to the popsicles.
These are good reasons to have a probability of 97% rather than 99.9% but I’m really not convinced that anything you’ve described has a substantially higher than 3% chance of happening.
Some of the concerns you’re bringing up are obviously-to-me-and-therefore-Keepers nowhere near sufficient to argue the chance is under 97%. The Precipice puts x-risk due to asteroids/comets at 1/100K per millennium and stellar explosion at 1/100M. (The other natural risk, supervolcanos, it puts at 1/1000. I believe Eliezer has said that dath ilan is diligently monitoring supervolcanos.)
At one year the Petrov Day button was pressed because a direct message had the word “admin” in the sending users name. The challenge is not that the threats are especially bad but that there are many kinds of them. Claims like “nothing bad happens to the website” are extremely disjunctive. If even one of the things I would be worried about had a 3% chance of happening and if it happened it would spell doom then that would be enough. If there were 1000 things that threatened then on average they would only need a 0.003% chance to happen on average. There are so many more failure modes for a civilization than a website.
This analogy seems kind of silly. Dath ilan isn’t giving people a “destroy the cryonics facilities” button. I agree the 3% probably consists of a lot of small things that add up, but I don’t think there’s obviously >1000 black swans with a >3/1000 probability of happening.
It’s not particularly obvious that the future is more than, say, a century, and if AI / nukes / bioterrorism were addressed then I’d also probably be 97% on no apocalypse?
if 3% is spent just to be able to work then it goes down from there from being able to make particular achievements. One could ponder on given infinite working time what is the chance that humans have quantum gravity. And its also not about the tech being made but also the current patients being able to benefit from it. No political upheavals or riots that would compromise the bodily safety of millions of patients for centuries or millenia? They think they can figure out resurrection without knowing what principles apply? That is like saying “I will figure antimatter bombs” without knowing what an atom is.
Riots or upheavals which damage the cryonically suspended seems too unlikely to be an issue to dath ilan? And it’s not like the resurrection is going to take new laws of physics, it’s just a very tricky engineering challenge which they’re probably planning to put the AGI on?
Upheavals could include things like a political faction rising that wants to incorporate a new form of punishment of administered True Death. And since they have done it before if they ever need to do a total screening of the past again that is next to impossible to achieve with popsicle relics around. It would probably be a downlooked supervillain but out of the population not one has the explicit goal of sabotaging the cryopatients? The amount of murders that don’t utilise the head removal service is non-zero afterall.
Supernovas or asteroids could make it tricky to keep the lights on. With a couple of centuries passing and no Future having onset the doubt that its going to happen might creep in a little differently. At some point the warm population is going to be tiny compared to the popsicles.
These are good reasons to have a probability of 97% rather than 99.9% but I’m really not convinced that anything you’ve described has a substantially higher than 3% chance of happening.
Some of the concerns you’re bringing up are obviously-to-me-and-therefore-Keepers nowhere near sufficient to argue the chance is under 97%. The Precipice puts x-risk due to asteroids/comets at 1/100K per millennium and stellar explosion at 1/100M. (The other natural risk, supervolcanos, it puts at 1/1000. I believe Eliezer has said that dath ilan is diligently monitoring supervolcanos.)
At one year the Petrov Day button was pressed because a direct message had the word “admin” in the sending users name. The challenge is not that the threats are especially bad but that there are many kinds of them. Claims like “nothing bad happens to the website” are extremely disjunctive. If even one of the things I would be worried about had a 3% chance of happening and if it happened it would spell doom then that would be enough. If there were 1000 things that threatened then on average they would only need a 0.003% chance to happen on average. There are so many more failure modes for a civilization than a website.
This analogy seems kind of silly. Dath ilan isn’t giving people a “destroy the cryonics facilities” button. I agree the 3% probably consists of a lot of small things that add up, but I don’t think there’s obviously >1000 black swans with a >3/1000 probability of happening.