Humans are at risk of going extinct. According to Oxford-based philosopher Toby Ord's 2020 book "The Precipice," we have one in six chances of "existential catastrophe" in the next century.
Anticipated Existential Catastrophe To Lead Human Extinction?
Ord's alarming claim drew several headlines. Australian politician Andrew Leigh referenced it in his recent speech in Melbourne.
Per Steven Stern, it's difficult to argue against the notion that we confront alarming possibilities in the ensuing decades, from rogue AI and massive asteroids to climate change, nuclear weapons, and bioengineered viruses.
Frequentism, the most conventional theory of probability, got its name from its history in dice and card games. By monitoring the frequency of threes across many rolls, we can conclude that there is a one-in-six chance that a fair die will produce a three.
If the forecaster did a decent job, we should be able to verify that, as they claimed, there was a one in six chance of rain the next day. Therefore, traditional probability is based on data and methods. We require a set of repeated events to base our estimate on to calculate it.
Bayesianism, named after the English statistician Thomas Bayes, is an alternative method of thinking about probability. It concentrates more on what we know, anticipate, and believe about events than the events themselves.
To put it simply, Bayesians view probabilities as a sort of ranking system. According to this viewpoint, it is best to compare a probability's specific value to that of other probabilities to determine which events are more and less likely.
For instance, a table of hypothetical extinction events and Ord's estimations of their probabilities are included in the book. These values can be seen as relative ranks from a Bayesian perspective.
Climate change is significantly more likely to cause extinction than an asteroid hit, according to Ord, who also believes that both are much less likely than what he refers to as "unaligned artificial intelligence."
The issue here is that the starting estimates of Bayesian probabilities (commonly referred to as "priors") are somewhat arbitrary (for instance, I would place the likelihood of AI-based extinction far lower). By using relevant observational knowledge of outcomes to "update" probability values, traditional Bayesian reasoning shifts from "priors" to "posteriors."
Again, few findings are pertinent to the likelihood of human extinction.
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Humans Experiencing Sixth Mass Extinction
There were already five mass extinctions that happened on Earth - Ordovician-Silurian Extinction (440 million years ago), Late Devonian Extinction (365 million years ago), Permian-Triassic Extinction (253 million years ago), Triassic-Jurassic Extinction (201 million years ago), and K-Pg Extinction (66 million years ago).
Experts claim that, unlike previous extinction events, which were caused by natural factors, we are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction, which is being driven by human action, notably, though not only, the unsustainable use of land, water, and energy, as well as climate change.
At present, agriculture is practiced on 40% of all land. Additionally, 70% of all freshwater worldwide is used for agriculture. Ninety percent of the world's deforestation is due to it, which has a terrible effect on the animals who dwell there by radically altering their habitats.
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