[nefitty]

You're not taking into account technological and industrial innovation. Presumably there will be new ideas iterated upon that get us closer to universal abundance.

My main concerns over the next few decades are cyberwar collapse (< 1% chance), runaway AI (10% chance), robotized world war (30% chance), and solar flare induced societal collapse (40% chance).

Yeah, cereal is 20% more expensive but DeepMind just beat GPT3.

[RealityVoid]

I wonder why solar flare societal collapse ranks so high on your list.

[kortex]

Not GP but it's a cascade failure mode with theoretically no upper bound in how much chaos it could cause. A toilet paper shortage caused millions to lose their goddamn minds, what do you think having no refrigeration on a world scale for even a week would do? A CME could potentially fry enough equipment that we would be left in in the dark and unable to repair for months, just due to availability of parts. I believe those estimates are at current production rates, too. If the supply chain and global comms are compromised, it's even harder.

It's definitely at the sweet spot of "terrifying" and "completely plausible."

[nefitty]

Yes, perfectly said.

Here's in-depth info on solar flares. Major ones are considered "Carrington-level events", due to a flare that occurred in 1859: https://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-solar-superstorm-the-...

Vox's 2014 breakdown of the systemic risks: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2014/7/30/5951263/a-catastr...

NASA article on the prediction that there was a 12% chance a Carrington-level event would occur by 2022: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/2...

My 40% is based on that information. I'm gut-extrapolating to the next few decades, with the understanding that large devastating flares occur every few hundred years.

[xsarin]

Society is so incredibly dependent on technology that is not EMP resistant and if a solar flare knocks out most of our electronics the bottom is going to fall out. No phones or internet to figure out what's going on, no cars since the onboard electronics are needed- same with trucks, trains etc. Can't go to the grocery store and buy food with your debit card, can't get cash from the bank, grocery store isn't going to get shipments anymore etc.

Our dependence on it all puts us on really fragile ground given that we know there have been sun events in the last 150 years that would obliterate everything we have today

[RealityVoid]

I have read that the dangers of EMP's are greatly overstated and they could damage stuff, but mostly the power grid, since you need long lines to induce sufficient power for it to matter.

[jacquesm]

Exactly. At about 30V / km the potential to do damage to smaller electric circuits is limited, but anything connected to longer lines is at risk.

[baq]

resources are finite and technological innovation is finite, too. thermodynamics gives us very precise upper limits to efficiency increases and to the surprise of no one, low hanging fruit are all picked.

[jstanley]

You could have said the same thing 100 years ago.

[CuriouslyC]

You're making the same mistake all the star eyed futurists make, which is to not realize that in reality, all exponential curves are just early/mid stage sigmoidal curves. You can paradigm shift all you want, that's not going to make infinite progression a thing.

[azeirah]

You're making the same mistake all star eyed futurists-skeptics make, which is to not realize that in reality, new sigmoidal curves are started all over the place.

It's just a matter of time and survival. How long? I don't know. Probably long.

[CuriouslyC]

There is a finite set of sigmoidal curves that can accelerate/plateau. If you add the "progress" from every curve in the set, that also forms a sigmoidal curve (via a transformation of the central limit theorem) with a plateau that is inescapable. You can't out paradigm shift the nature of reality.

[snovv_crash]

Not just sigmoidal, on a longer timeframe they usually end up being more like gaussian

[cryptonector]

Indeed. Eventually the planet will run out of CO2 and life on Earth will almost completely disappear. Eventually plate tectonics will stop as well due to the core of the planet cooling. Eventually the Sun will go red giant and the Earth will really die then. Eventually we'll reach the heat death of the universe.

A gaussian with a really long tail!

We're doomed even if we go inter-planetary -- even if we spread through the galaxy! But the timescales are pretty large, and before then we can have a pretty long (in human scales) and good time.

[snovv_crash]

> A gaussian with a really long tail!

So, a Poisson distribution?

[baq]

a single example: a 100 years ago the efficiency of ICEs was less than 50% of today's. we're left with maybe 2x until physics doesn't allow us any further improvements.

another example - transistors - we've got maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 30 years of improvements ahead of us, after that there are fundamental limits that forbid progress.

the rate of change of total technology improvements will slow down and at some point will start to approach zero; maybe even go negative as we as a civilization start to forget how to do things faster than invent new ways of doing things.

[nefitty]

The hard variable is paradigm-shifts. We see things like quantum computers now, which seem boring at the moment, but the sorts of problems they'll be able to handle are staggering to imagine.

Robotics keeps improving, eg replacement/enhancement of human labor. That's a paradigm shift.

I definitely see your point about physical limits. I propose that we're nowhere near our ideational limits, which give us the imaginative capacity to form new solutions within those limits you cite.

[baq]

> I propose that we're nowhere near our ideational limits, which give us the imaginative capacity to form new solutions within those limits you cite.

the problem is, thermodynamics is so generic that it's hard to imagine how to sidestep it - and people do try all the time.

e.g. imagine we have a commercially viable fusion reactor, which translates to basically unlimited energy once you build enough of them that they can be operated and maintained using only fusion power from sister reactors. sounds like post-scarcity world, except if you keep power consumption growing for like 1-2% a year, you'll boil the oceans in a few centuries due to waste heat.

if you invent a technology to capture and repurpose enough waste heat to avoid this problem, you sidestep thermodynamics. if you sidestep thermodynamics, there's a lot more you can do than just making fusion 100% efficient...

[jstanley]

There are several potential paradigm shifts which this doesn't address.

For example, power consumption may stop growing even while "real" consumption continues to grow. Or we may spread to other planets so that power consumption can keep growing and we don't care if the oceans boil.

Or something else might happen that is hard to predict in the same way that medieval people would find the Internet hard to predict. Medieval people may have made equally valid claims about bounds on the speed at which a messenger can transmit a message, even if you manage to develop a commercially viable racehorse that can run at top speed 24/7.

[cryptonector]

> the problem is, thermodynamics is so generic that it's hard to imagine how to sidestep it - and people do try all the time.

Population is already set to decrease.

Speaking of thermodynamics...

The life-carbon cycle on the planet is not a reversible process. Photosynthetic life, and sea life (sea shells require a lot of carbon) pull down a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere. Sea life in particular leads to carbon being sequestered in limestone over millions of years. Land life leads to carbon being buried in soil. This process trades low-entropy, high-energy sunlight for high-entropy, low-energy light emitted back to space by the planet (keeping us in equilibrium), with the entropy going into things on Earth, like the conversion of CO2 into limestone.

The biggest and shortest-term natural threat to life on this planet is dwindling atmospheric CO2. At the end of each glacial period (thus the beginning of each interglacial) CO2 is lower than at the end of the previous glacial period, and it has been thus since the beginning of the current ice age, and it seems like a pattern that will keep repeating. Eventually the Earth will fall below the photosynthesis starvation level of atmospheric CO2. Before the Industrial Revolution, and the oil&gas revolution in particular, that was going to be just a few more glacial periods. By raising atmospheric CO2 to 400+ppm we've bought the planet a few million years, and even so, if humans were to disappear in the next glacial period, we'd be looking at a closer end to life on the planet through exhaustion of atmospheric CO2 than through astronomic catastrophes like a large asteroid hitting the planet.

[cryptonector]

And people did. Malthus was over 200 years ago.

[cryptonector]

Yes, but you're assuming indefinite growth. Again, in the real world we're already on a path to decreasing population.

[cnlevy]

Sure, African agriculture is already at max. efficency. Giant farms fully mechanized, of course /s

[snapcaster]

Kind of unrelated but if you're interested in African agriculture you should look into Seeing Like a State. The book argues mechanized farms aren't necessarily the highest form of farming for maximum sustainable yield in many places (like many regions in Africa) and has many many hard to notice downsides. A lot of the pressure to consolidate and mechanize has to do with legibility for taxation purposes compared to true yield maximization

[nefitty]

Great point. I'm starting to look at Africa for that low hanging fruit.