IEET Readers’ Top Fear: Theocracy

Asked what they fear most, IEET readers named ‘Theocracy’ as their top choice by a surprisingly wide margin in a recently concluded poll. Coming in second was ‘Totalitarian world government’. In third place was ‘Ecological collapse’ followed closely by ‘Global thermonuclear war’. No other answer was chosen by more than 10% of respondents.

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Posted by Aleksei Riikonen  on  08/12  at  10:20 PM

I guess it was deliberate to leave out all AI-related risks. If there's support for that damned singularitarian thinking among IEET readership, you wouldn't want it to show! I'm not sure if I'd rank AI-related risks as the most probable catastrophic scenarios (actually I wouldn't, if I were pressed to adopt a position on the matter), but I do rank them as the kind most deserving of additional attention, since they are so poorly understood so widely. This is in stark contrast to many of the risks listed here, which aren't terribly hard to analyze, and for which there therefore is wide agreement among intellectuals on good mitigation strategies.

Posted by Abraham  on  08/12  at  10:50 PM

I find it ironic that many of the totalitarian regimes were decidedly NOT theocratic.

Posted by Aleksei Riikonen  on  08/12  at  10:57 PM

Hmm, interesting that my above comment didn't appear in the form I originally posted it. I broke it up into two separate paragraphs, but it emerged from the moderation process as a single paragraph, which I think makes it seem less coherent. ("I'm not sure [...]" was where the second paragraph started.)

Posted by Ben Scarlato  on  08/13  at  01:05 AM

Aleksei: I was the one who approved your comment. I know I didn't make any changes to it, but for some reason even when I preview a comment for this post that is written as two paragraphs it shows as one. I just wanted to reassure you that there isn't some conspiracy to make Singularitarian-supportive comments look incoherent (or if there is, I don't know about it).

Posted by Aleksei Riikonen  on  08/13  at  06:03 AM

I just noticed that it's the same thing for me: If I preview my comment that I wrote as separate paragraphs, it nevertheless shows as a single paragraph. This means that the functionality in this comment section is different than in the comment sections of the other articles on this site (at least the ones I've posted to).

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