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. 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. 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. 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: 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.

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:The first detonation under Operation Ivy, which involved testing the hydrogen bomb. Underwood Archives/Archive Photos/Getty Images Doomsday today

The unconditioned n distribution of the current population is identical to the vague prior N probability density function, [note 1] so: 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.” 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. 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. P ( N ∣ n ) = P ( n ∣ N ) P ( N ) P ( n ) . {\displaystyle P(N\mid n)={\frac {P(n\mid N)P(N)}{P(n)}}.}

What is a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) or comet

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. This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources.

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. The easiest way to produce the doomsday estimate with a given confidence (say 95%) is to pretend that N is a continuous variable (since it is very large) and integrate over the probability density from N = n to N = Z. (This will give a function for the probability that N ≤ Z):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 constant, k, is chosen to normalize the sum of P( N). The value chosen is not important here, just the functional form (this is an improper prior, so no value of k gives a valid distribution, but Bayesian inference is still possible using 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} . Find sources: "Doomsday argument"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( August 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users .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.” 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? 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.” 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.” 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.