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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. 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. 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:
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} . 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. 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. 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.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.
P ( N ≤ Z ) = ∫ N = n N = Z P ( N | n ) d N {\displaystyle P(N\leq Z)=\int _{N=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.) The premise of the argument is as follows: suppose that the total number of human beings that will ever exist is fixed. If so, the likelihood of a randomly selected person existing at a particular time in history would be proportional to the total population at that time. Given this, the argument posits that a person alive today should adjust their expectations about the future of the human race because their existence provides information about the total number of humans that will ever live. 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 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.giving P ( N | n) for each specific N (through a substitution into the posterior probability equation): The risk of atomic escalation in Ukraine brings the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Daniel Zimmer, a post-doctoral researcher at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, tells Inverse. “It makes sense that the hands would be moved up an additional ten seconds closer to midnight for 2023.”
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