The Great Problems.
Kevin M. Esvelt; Rosalind Picard; Neil Buddy Shah; Amy Smith; Anne White; Kai Steinmetz; David Keith; Toby Ord; Megan Palmer.
MIT.
canvas.mit.edu .
2021.
Introduction: Triumphs and Tragedies
Great Problem: Mental Health
- Finland is the happiest country in the world, and the Finns aren’t happy about it.
- Burden of Depressive Disorders by Country, Sex, Age and Year
- Development, Freedom, and Rising Happines: A Global Perspective (1981 - 2007)
- How to Be Happy
- A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning
- How Bad Are Things?
Technological Trajectories
- The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing and Briefly Saved Lives
- Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch
- Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented
- Why Your Car Isn’t Electric
- The Alchemy of Air
Great Problem: Global Health and Development
- How To Measure Anything
- Moral Weights
- The Man Who Helped Feed the world
- Categorizing Variants of Goodhart’s Law
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Predicting the Future
- Timid Choices and Bold Forecasts
- What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years
- Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014
- Superforrcasting
Great Problem: Inequality
- ✅ Letter from Birmingham Jail ( notes ).
- ✅ Your Ancestors, Your Fate ( notes ).
- ✅ How Poverty Ends ( notes ).
- ✅ Trials and Tribulations ( notes ).
- ✅ The Only Thing That’s Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe ( notes ).
- Why Nations Fail
- Institutions Rule
- The Great Leveler
Great Problem: Energy
- UN Human Development Reports and Energy Metrics
- Oil Conflict, and US National Interests
- Energy (Our World in Data)
- Energy and Civilization
- The Kardsshev Scale
Incentives and Biases
- Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet
- 50 Cognitive Biases in the Modern World
- Posters and Card Decks on Fallacies and Biases
- Tools and Mini-Courses
- Effective Choice in Prisoner’s Dilemma
- The Elephant in the Brain
- Is Tit-for-Tat the Answer?
- Thinking from A to Z
Great Problem: Cooperation
- Moral Tribes
- Game Theory Calls Cooperation into Question
- The Moral Machine Experiment
- Spontaneous Giving and Calculated Greed
- From Extortion to Generosity: Evolution in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma
- Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
What About Non-Humans?
- All Animals are Equal
- The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Great Problem: Animal Well-Being
- Cellular Agriculture: The Future of Food
- The Backlash Against Impossible and Beyond Meat Burgers Going Mainstream
- The Humaneness of Rodent Pest Control
- When Are We Obligated to Edit Wild Creatures?
Great Problem: Climate and Geoengineering
- Evaluating Climate Geoengineering Proposals in the Context of the Paris Agreement Temperature Goals
- Marine Cloud Brightening
- Halving Warming with Idealized Solar Geoengineering Moderates Key Climate Hazards
- How Green Sand Could Capture Billions of Tons of Carbon Dioxide
Today and Tomorrow
- Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority
- The Overwhelming Importance of the Far Future
Great Problem: Physical Catastrophe
- The Precipice
- Dr. Strangelove
- 1983 Soviet Nuclear False Alarm Incident
- Human Extinction from Natural Hazard Events
- The Dead Hand
Great Problem: Civilizational Resilience
- The Precipice, Chapter 7
- The Fraility of Interdependency
- Supply Chains and the Corona Virus
- Manual for Civilization
- The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
- The Collapse of Complex Societies
Potential Game Changer: Reweaving Perception
- The Thirteenth Floor
- How to Use the Experience Machine
- The Brave New World of Wireheading
- A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning
- Permutation City
- Diaspora
Potential Game Changer: Shaping Future Humans
- A Proposal to Use Gamete Cycling In Vitro to Improve Crops and Livestock
- Embryo Selection for Cognitive Enhancement
- At 71, She’s Never Felt Pain or Anxiety
- Embryo Selection: Overview of the Major Approaches
- GATTACA
Great Problem: Exponential Biology
- Innoculating Science Against Potential Pandemics and Information Hazards
- The Unilateralist’s Curse
- The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
Potential Game Changer: Extended Intelligence
- Phsyical Principles for Scalable Neural Recording
- This Alien Shore
Great Problem: Artificial General Intelligence
- Of Myths and Moonshine
- Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control