The Vulnerable World Hypothesis
By Nick Bostrom. Global Policy, 2019
137 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Scienti fi c and technological progress might change people ’ s capabilities or incentives in ways that would destabilize civilization. For example, advances in DIY biohacking tools might make it easy for anybody with basic training in biology to kill millions; novel military technologies could trigger arms races in which whoever strikes fi rst has a decisive advantage; or some economically advantageous process may be invented that produces disastrous negative global externalities that are hard to regulate. This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable world : roughly, one in which there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41918a9ed66135691d741d0285c5ef24ea9597ff
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Unsolved Problems in ML Safety (2021, background): “Malicious actors may eventually repurpose ML systems for social manipulation [27], for assisting research on novel weapons [18], or for cyberattacks [26].”