As someone else said, very sane people like Musk, Hawkings, and Gates are warning of AI CRISPR.
It's not the cliche SkyNet or Ghost in the Shell stuff per se. For example, automation and how it's effecting the economy really does matter, regardless of how much we in the valley would like to avoid that narrative.
Ehhhh... those folks are smart but none of them would make a top 10 list of the sanest people according to me.
> It's not the cliche SkyNet or Ghost in the Shell stuff per se. For example, automation and how it's effecting the economy really does matter
Sure, but this sounds like a cop-out in context.
Why does that sound like a cop out? Economic decline, the U.S. erosion of the fundamentals of a quality life, overpopulation / too many dependents and not enough young workers, etc... those are all valid reasons to prepare.
As is preparing for car accidents, sudden layoffs, floods, and so on.
And maybe this is silly and unfair, but to me "AI" in the context of prepping suggests very particular things. What you're describing should probably be called "social unrest" or "revolution" caused by displacement of labor.
That being said, I'm personally not sure if one should put too much weight on his opinions regarding that matter.
I'm still more of a prepper lurker that's reading up on this stuff while friends are starting to take it more seriously. I personally don't know if prepping is a fad like cold war-era nuclear bunkers, a potential lifesaver like a beefed up version of the red cross emergency kits, or somewhere in between as a useful hobby like hiking and camping, but my inner research nerd is having a great time learning more.
It helps that my YC team was a product review website and there's a lot of gear junkies in the survivalist crowd, so that's been my entry point into it, not so much the angle on being freaked out about the news.
Our URL redirects are for our analytics.
Here is my own list of concerns from 1999 (I'd add supervolcanoes and Cascadia subduction zone to that list now -- and of course replace Y2K with the Year 2038 problem): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm
Here is a picture of what happened to my mother's home city in the Netherlands when she was a teenager -- her family's house burned during the initial invasion -- and then she saw people including an elderly relative starve to death a couple years later -- so disasters do happen and sometimes seemingly out of the blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_bombing_of_Rotterdam#/m...
Most US Americans may ignore this fact, but our lives in the USA are completely dependent on the continual error-free functioning of decades-old Soviet missile-launch computers built with computer chips we tried to sabotage: http://www.businessinsider.com/russias-dead-hand-system-may-... "To deter the possibility of a U.S. nuclear first-strike, the Soviets created a system called Perimeter, also known as "Dead Hand." The Dead Hand was a computer system that could autonomously launch all of the USSR's nuclear weapons once it was activated, across the entirety of the Soviet Union."
Let's hope those 1970s-era Soviet computer engineers knew how to build reliable systems from unreliable components! But, it still may be prudent to prepare for the situation where those Soviet computers eventually fail in some unexpected way.
Example: "99 red ballons - Nena" (but failing from a large earthquake misinterpreted as a nuclear strike may be more likely): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14IRDDnEPR4
Humans have become a geological force with all our technologies of abundance -- including control of nuclear energy as well as massive use of fossil fuels. But then we ignore the implications of all that technology because dealing with the implications requires thinking differently -- and thinking differently can be hard, expensive, and sometimes painful. Related humor on the difficulty of thinking differently: "Star Wars: The Death Star Cantina | WDR" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yl_reBjVqU
As Albert Einstein said, "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)".
Of course, any Apple watch these days has more power than the computers used to design the first atomic weapons. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/07/turings-cathed... "[N]o other book has engaged so intelligently and disconcertingly with the digital age's relationship to nuclear weapons research, not just as a moral quandary to do with funding, but as an indispensable developmental influence, producing the conceptual tools that would unlock the intellectual power of the computer."
I generalized Einstein's theme for our new century to: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-tran...
Have been prepping in the SF / startup community for almost 10 years and teaching other techies how to prep for a long time, but historically was face to face because of stigma, etc.
We started The Prepared because prepping is very rational and it's gone mainstream enough to have threads like this on HN.
Beginners checklist here: https://theprepared.com/guides/emergency-preparedness-checkl...
Post on reasons why liberals should be preppers: https://theprepared.com/blog/five-reasons-why-liberals-shoul...
Happy to help anyone in their journey.
(long time personal HN members but this is a new account)