The doomsday calculation: How an equation that predicts the future is transforming everything we know about life and the universe

“One odd thing is that you very seldom get papers saying somebody is right,” Leslie told me. “It’s so much easier to get a paper published saying someone is wrong.” The stream of doomsday papers continues to this day.

A Copernican outlook challenges some of the venerable rules of investing. One is that stocks outperform bonds in the long run. This rule deserves to come with an asterisk, says Hendrik Bessembinder of Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business. Historically, most stocks have done worse than US Treasury bills. That’s allowing for reinvested dividends, capital gains, splits, everything. How is this even possible? Bessembinder examined the returns of all stocks on the NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ exchanges from 1926 to 2015. He found that the stock market’s performance is mainly due to a tiny minority of stocks that hit it big and remain successful. The average stock does far worse. The median life of a stock on the three exchanges was barely seven years. The most common return was close to a total loss. If this is hard to believe, it’s because indexes, like the S&P 500 or Dow Jones, do not say much about the typical stock. They are like Eddington’s net, scooping up the bigger fish. All the stocks in the indexes are already winners. The indexes quickly drop companies that have stopped winning, replacing them with new winners.

“The Doomsday argument does not fail for any trivial reason,” Bostrom wrote. It has commanded extraordinary debate because, well, that’s what philosophers do. Controversies get published, while consensus trivialities perish.

The modern simulation hypothesis is generally traced to computer scientist—-entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram and his 2002 book, A New Kind of Science. Wolfram made the case that our world might literally be a digital simulation. He presented this idea as a testable hypothesis. It might be possible to look for evidence of “pixelization” in subatomic physics. But not a few reviewers of Wolfram’s book pegged him as a genius who had gone off the deep end.

Bostrom’s trilemma takes strong AI as a given. Maybe it should be called a quadrilemma, with strong AI as the fourth leg of the stool. But for most of those following what Bostrom is saying, strong Al is taken for granted.

In Ulam and von Neumann’s original sense, the singularity is the ultimate black swan event, not to be predicted from anything that came before, and “beyond which human affairs…could not continue.” The singularity could be another name for doomsday.

A long human future is not an impossible goal. It may, however, be something that has to be earned by being smarter, wiser, kinder, more careful—and luckier—than we’ve ever had to be before. The first rule of defying the odds is to never deny the odds.Early though we may be in the future running through our heads, we are always and already running out of time. Like our remote ancestors, and like all who come after, we see in the distance a singularity, a boundary of the reference class, a monolith marking the end of the world as we know it. We are about to discover the truth of how special we are.

How long have we got? My standard answer is 760 years. That’s a median birth-clock Copernican prediction translated into years, using current population estimates. I am surprised at how often the reaction is relief. Seven hundred sixty years means it won’t affect them, their great-grandchildren, or anybody they know.

Bostrom puts the probability of long-term survival at a similar three in four (and does not believe a doomsday shift is justified).