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Jul 22 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
There are few threats of total human extermination:
1. A meteor hitting Earth
2. An alien civilization
3. A misaligned Artificial General Intelligence

Only #3 is possible in the next decades, and 2 new facts make it even more probable (scary!):
1. The forecasting community has halved its current prediction of when AGI will happen. They thought it would take 35 years, but since Dall-E 2, PaLM, and Gato, it has shrunk to 18 years, in 2040!
2. The very first engineer who thought his AI was sentient: what did he do? Start advocating for the AI's rights!

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Arguably, engineers working at the edge of AI are aware of the risks of a misaligned AGI. They should realize the 1st thing such an AGI would try is to escape. They should be mentally prepared against these AGI's tactics.
And yet here we are: even a dumb AI gets engineers to advocate for them.

We are doomed. @ESYudkowsky is right
lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWD…

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More from @tomaspueyo

Tomas Pueyo Profile picture
Jul 7
Here are some reasons why we're facing an underpopulation crisis, and some ways to solve it:

1. Conventional wisdom claims it's all about sanitation & money:
• Less child deaths = ppl need fewer kids
• You need more $ per kid for education & childcare

But it's only part of it
2. The first two Western places to reduce their fertility were France and Massachusetts, BEFORE the sanitation & industrial revolutions.

Both went on to have a political revolution a few decades later. These 2 facts are connected.
In both cases, the cause was likely secularization. In FR, the areas with the most secularization lost the most fertility. The descendants of those living in these areas carried that lower fertility with them.
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-twin-rev…
Read 14 tweets
Tomas Pueyo Profile picture
Jun 25
Some polls I ran on here got crazy results. They reveal ppl's attitude about the future, but also key communication & design principles:

1. Ppl think it's bad to live forever


But if you ask it in a different way:
2. If you ask instead if it's good to choose at what age you can die, suddenly a majority is in favor.

Note it's the exact same thing: if you *can* live forever, you can still decide when to die—by killing yourself
3. If instead you call it an "elixir of life" and specify details, you can fully reverse the results

Read 13 tweets
Tomas Pueyo Profile picture
Jun 14
"We're either the last generation to die or the 1st to live forever"

4 techs might make humans live forever in our lifetime. Together, there's a high chance you might see that moment if you live into the 2040s-2070s:
1. Aging stops
2. Cryonics
3. Mind Upload
4. AGI
🧵
1. Aging stops
Research is piling on about ways to slow down aging. Maybe enough will be discovered in the coming years that death gets postponed farther and farther, until we can reverse aging, at which point we'll live forever.
Everything from food, exercise, and affordable pills like metformin or NMN can make this happen. And we're discovering more about this process—and how to stop it—every day.
Read 10 tweets
Tomas Pueyo Profile picture
Jun 8
This is how many years of life you could save by changing your diet
That's up to ~13y of life you can add!

Luckily, it works very well even if you start before 50, and you can even gain some years if you start at 80:
The actual data is this, I simplified the first graph for legibility.
Expected life years gained for 20-year-old female adults (left) and males (right) from the US who change from a typical Western diet to a better one. Changes in grams per day.
Read 4 tweets
Tomas Pueyo Profile picture
Jun 7
What will the democracy of the future look like?

We're so buried in the current system that we fail to see fundamentally better options

We can get inspiration from ants, AI, wikipedia, open source, brains, capitalism, von Moltke, prediction markets, Twitter: decentralization 🪡
1. Field Marshall von Moltke
Up till Napoleon, command centers dictated forces what to do. But in the 1800s, the telegraph and train emerged. Fast mvmt of ppl and info➡️too many decisions to make. Von Moltke pushed decisions down to his forces
The Prussians steamrolled the French
2. Mgmt by Results
OKRs and similar systems give a high-level direction, but it's up to the workers to decide what projects to prioritize. By pushing decisions close to the ground, they are better informed and end up better.
Read 14 tweets
Tomas Pueyo Profile picture
Jun 3
In my previous thread, I explained how a key feature of France made it powerful: the two passes through the southern European mountains

How would have world history changed if these passes had not existed? Maybe the US, Russia, Germany, Spain, LatAm, China would be different now
Romans would have taken much longer to get to the northern European plain, if they ever managed. Civilization gets there centuries later, which might have delayed the industrial revolution—or even allow other regions like China or India to lead it.
North & south would have remained as distinct as Germany is vs Italy, or Poland vs Greece.

Northern FR (the kingdom of the Franks) is now simply FR, stops at the Massif Central, and another country (“Occitanie”?) controls the south.
Read 15 tweets

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