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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. 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. This is Bayes' theorem for the posterior probability of the total population ever born of N, conditioned on population born thus far of n. Now, using the indifference principle: The social web is doing exactly what it was built for. Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence. The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California. 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.
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. P ( N ∣ n ) = P ( n ∣ N ) P ( N ) P ( n ) . {\displaystyle P(N\mid n)={\frac {P(n\mid N)P(N)}{P(n)}}.}The doomsday argument does not say that humanity cannot or will not exist indefinitely. It does not put any upper limit on the number of humans that will ever exist nor provide a date for when humanity will become extinct. An abbreviated form of the argument does make these claims, by confusing probability with certainty. However, the actual conclusion for the version used above is that there is a 95% chance of extinction within 9,120 years and a 5% chance that some humans will still be alive at the end of that period. (The precise numbers vary among specific doomsday arguments.) It's just not the case that any organization or any person, however prestigious, can simply say, ‘hey guys, the world is in a bad place. Could you please fix it?” he says. “The problems are too big. The world is too complicated.” 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.” f {\textstyle f} is uniformly distributed on (0,1) even after learning the absolute position n {\textstyle n} . For example, there is a 95% chance that f {\textstyle f} is in the interval (0.05,1), that is f > 0.05 {\textstyle f>0.05} . In other words, one can assume with 95% certainty that any individual human would be within the last 95% of all the humans ever to be born. If the absolute position n {\textstyle n} is known, this argument implies a 95% confidence upper bound for N {\textstyle N} obtained by rearranging n / N > 0.05 {\textstyle n/N>0.05} to give N < 20 n {\textstyle N<20n} . 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.
O f the many things humans are consistently terrible at doing, seeing the future is somewhere near the top of the list. This flaw became a preoccupation among Megadeath Intellectuals such as Herman Kahn and his fellow economists, mathematicians, and former military officers at the Rand Corporation in the 1960s. P ( N ≤ Z ) = ∫ N = n N = Z P ( N | n ) d N {\displaystyle P(N\leq Z)=\int _{N=n}If the total number of humans who were born or will ever be born is denoted by N {\textstyle N} , then the Copernican principle suggests that any one human is equally likely (along with the other N − 1 {\textstyle N-1} humans) to find themselves in any position n {\textstyle n} of the total population N {\textstyle N} so humans assume that our fractional position f = n / N {\textstyle f=n/N} is uniformly distributed on the interval [0,1] before learning our absolute position. 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: Find sources: "Doomsday argument"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( August 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) 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. This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources.
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? 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. 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. What a dreadful set of choices when you frame it that way,” Geltzer told me when I put this question to him in another conversation. “The idea of a free-for-all sounds really bad until you see what the purportedly moderated and curated set of platforms is yielding … It may not be blood onscreen, but it can really do a lot of damage.”T he Doomsday Machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is buried deep underground, but connected to a computer, which is in turn hooked up to sensors in cities and towns across the United States. Gott specifically proposes the functional form for the prior distribution of the number of people who will ever be born ( N). Gott's DA used the vague prior distribution: 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. 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] 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.
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. We may not be able to predict the future, but we do know how it is made: through flashes of rare and genuine invention, sustained by people’s time and attention. Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.But is a public relations metaphor conceived more than half a century ago still an effective device for communicating risk in the contemporary world? Was it ever? giving P ( N | n) for each specific N (through a substitution into the posterior probability equation): The unconditioned n distribution of the current population is identical to the vague prior N probability density function, [note 1] so: This argument has generated a philosophical debate, and no consensus has yet emerged on its solution. The variants described below produce the DA by separate derivations. 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.
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