Analyzing the historical rate of catastrophes

In the list of catastrophes, the Mongol Wars should probably be included: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_E...

Some estimates are that 11% of the world's population was killed during this time.

Interesting approach. Doing this for events recent enough to be numbers to estimable is a well-chosen tactic - it gives a basis for estimating earlier millenia.

Leaving out wars, there's a lot of nasty that happened to humanity before 500BCE of course, including countless wars, but also including the Late Bronze Age collapse (around 2200BCE), which it looks like might have been worldwide. Dating tech has advanced greatly recently, so physical causes might eventually be known (quakes, volcanoes, climate change, floods...). But estimating deaths is hard.

P.S. Those who've avoided book 'Earth in Upheaval' for some reason (FO Velikovsky?) might consider checking out the first few chapters full of voluminous evidence of past, non-human catastrophes. Regardless of 'explanations', it's an impressive laundry list. (Now available in AI-read audiobook form.)

For a narrower but deeper treatment of violence (and war) alone, Pinker's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur... is well worth a read.

Self-replication is only dangerous because it creates more physical "stuff" to cause harm, exponentially fast. But the exponential is the dangerous part, not the replication. A software program replicating itself might seem dangerous until you realize that it's limited by the hardware of the single machine it runs on, so you can only really call it one total "organism." Otherwise a fork bomb would have already killed the human race.

TIL that the Black Death killed more than 1/4 of the human race. That’s just unbelievable.

I think technology has had significantly more effect on catastrophes than the author gives it credit for. You could argue that weapons tech significantly increased casualties in world wars. Global travel allows pandemics to spread globally. I'm sure there are other examples.

However, it also has ameliotating effects that are barely touched on here. Vaccines are the most obvious example. And as the author mentioned, the near elimination of famines is largely the result of technology.

While I can absolutely see the potential for AI to precipitate a catastrophe, to me it has more in common with technologies that have prevented or ameliorated them.

Has there been a single instance of a self replicating ai? The article seems to think so, but try as I might none of the image generators, chess engines, llms, or linear regression models I’ve used or seen has even once copied itself to another location let alone run itself.

The idea of ai as a novel self replicator is cool and appears in movies and books, but doesn’t seem to exist outside of fiction. The other article referenced seems to dream of a future 2030 AI with all the capabilities one can imagine isn’t supported by any reasonable projections for AI technology. It might as well be a warning about all the dangerously weaponizable portable fusion reactors that could exist if ITER development is super successful. In this respect, AI seems like an unlikely driver of catastrophe as defined in the near term.

Putting even a 5-10% increase in rates of calamity due to this technology, which has no evidence to support it, while discounting all other technologies including nuclear weapons claiming there’s too little data is not reasonable. The reality is, we don’t know what risk value to assign. We won’t know for some time.

Just leave out the AI bit from the otherwise reasonable looking statistical analysis, and you’ll be left with a more intellectually rigorous and useful work.

You cannot "estimate" the probability of a catastrophic event, i.e. a Black Swan. All you can say is that it's possible, and over a long enough time period, things like that will happen. As well as things you never imagined.