Our priors are insufficient to predict it because it is such a unique task. One sees a similar trend in machine learning and pattern recognition.”, From this we could conclude that doubling time in AI research is five to ten years (update by adding the recent boom in neural networks which is again five years). How much longer will the Berlin Wall stand? Galileo Galilei coined the word planet actually for the objects, which he discovered to move around Jupiter. Adopted for the Berlin Wall in 1969 this means that there is a 75 percent The multiplicative rule takes past measures multiplied with a constant factor. “Life is a school of probability.” — Walter Bagehot. Microsoft has been around for 40 years and with a 95% probability will still exist in one year and up to another 1,560 years. In fact, this line of argument turns us and the times we live in into a very special moment in time - however it is more likely that we live in just some random epoch that seems special to us because we are in it, but in fact is not special at all. For your security, we need to re-authenticate you. One of the most common assertions by technology enthusiasts and futurists (arguably one of my favourite targets for ridicule) is that whatever technology is booming today will replace older forms of technology and ruin the companies that produce these technologies. There would have to be a major change to this situation before any group of people could branch off into a new species, which is the only way in which a subsequent species can be formed. Berlin Wall falls. It is simply the most boring moment.

But Copernicus’ theory put the Earth into the same category as other planets. The other is the Copernican principle. If we want to forecast the life expectancy of a young person that younger than the average of the rest of the population – without further knowledge on the person’s health status, life style, situation it the home country and similar influencing factors – then we are to the safe side to use the average life expectancy. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account.

… While there are all kinds of crosswinds and headline risk and everything else at the moment, perhaps people should be open to the idea that really not much has changed from what we've seen virtually non-stop since 2009. If the person gets older and comes closer to the average life expectancy, then we can – with high confidence – add years to the average. Had Gott thrown a blindfolded dart at a world map to select his travel destination I’d buy it.

The most successful movie of 2018, Black Panther, made around 700 Million dollars, while Billionaire Boys Club, one of the worst performers, made a meager $600 — this is a difference of 6 orders of magnitude! The insight from the Copernican Principle is that you're not experiencing something at a moment that is special. This must happen within the next seventy-thousand years. While Gott ultimately has a more complicated equation, his prediction for the lifespan of the Berlin Wall was between two-thirds of a year and twenty-four years, with the wall ultimately falling twenty years later. Tetlock said people make a common error of overestimating the frequency of "inflection points" in whatever they're studying.

This theorem estimates the probability of the appearance of an event by making it dependent on the probability of the appearance of another event. Part of the problem is that simply saying "the status quo will probably persist for the time being" comes off as boring and doesn't win you any glory and doesn't get you much attention in the media. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast . He visited the wall of Berlin, but not for any event or any special reason. The average governing time of Egyptian Pharaos is difficult to forecast if we don’t have additional information.

( Log Out /  Not very optimistic. Nevermind the more detailed math, if you just break any cycle down into quarters, it’s more likely you’re in one of the two middle quarters than the first or last. I said, Well, there's nothing special about the timing of my visit. 3. This thread is archived.

So if I divide the Wall’s total history, from the beginning to the end, into four quarters, and I’m located randomly somewhere in there, there’s a fifty-percent chance that I’m in the middle two quarters—that means, not in the first quarter and not in the fourth quarter.”. Sounds contradictory to the idea that the Copernican principle puts common things and common people into centers. We call the former Gaussian distributions, and the latter power-law distributions. Hence it is very likely very close to the middle of the time, in which this wall exists. ( Log Out /  How Gott estimated the remaining lifetime of the Berlin Wall in 1969. So he removed Earth from its special place and gave it into a common place among the other planets, which were by the way not called planets but wandering stars at his time. Each newsletter has five stories that are moving markets and ends with a quick paragraph on something one of the authors is thinking about. If that seems like a wide range, remember he was making this prediction in 1969 at the height of Cold War uncertainty in what must have seemed like a “special moment”. Would it be in the center of the universe, then it would have moved differently from all other planets. This was a perfect example for the Copernican principle.

This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Consider the German Tank Problem: during World War II, the Allies tried to estimate the total number of German tanks based on the serial numbers of tanks captured so far. So for example, geopolitical forecasters are likely to overstate the odds of an imminent regime change or coup in any given country, despite those events being extremely rare.

Gott’s Berlin Wall prediction — it will stand between a third and 3 times as long as it already stood — is thus similar to a Bayesian prediction with a power-law prior, with the difference that the multiplicative factor is not known. He visited the wall of Berlin, but not for any event or any special reason. Gott successfully tested his method by predicting the running time of Broadway shows. So the Earth was since then seen as a wandering star, but among the wandering stars it was in the middle because it was common. During a trip through Europe as a young man in 1969 he stopped at the Berlin Wall and was musing whether he would see the Wall come down during his lifetime. ( Log Out /  For expected movie revenue the value 1.4 is used. 13 comments. Cryptocurrencies are going to replace fiat currencies and capitalism is coming to an end within a generation. After all, the suggestion that the most likely future is one where things will be roughly the same as they are now hardly seems like a bold take. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. In Statistics terms, this extra information is our prior. My visit is random in time. Thanks. Cosmology as a science originated with the Copernican principle, which implies that celestial bodies obey identical physical laws to those on Earth, and Newtonian mechanics, which first allowed those physical laws to be understood. Gott’s reasoning that he did not visit the Wall at any special moment in time is really an application of the much broader Copernican principle, which states that we occupy neither a special place, nor exist in a special time in the Universe’s history. If we have the feeling for which distribution we are dealing with, then we have the basic building block for a forecast. 2. In case that we are the last species of human beings, it is an important information that our species exists since somewhere between one-hundred-thousand and two-hundred-thousand years. If our current moment in time is not in any way special (it could be, but it is unlikely) then Gott’s so-called “Copernican Principle” allows us to calculate a confidence band for the future survival. IBM has been around for more than 100 years and with a 95% probability will still exist in two years and up to 3,900 years.

This is a surprisingly reliable principle. If we apply the Copernican principle to this distribution, then there is a 50% probability that AI will be created  within the next five years (i.e. It is clear that this implementation of the Copernican principle may have many flaws: 1. This is what went through J. Richard Gott’s head when he visited Germany in 1969. In this case will mankind still exist for approximately eight-hundred-thousand years. For a 90-year-old and a 6-year-old with an average life expectancy of 76 years, we could set it to 94 and 77 years respectively (the 6-year-old gets one bonus year, because he has survived child mortality). Cryptocurrencies are going to replace fiat currencies and capitalism is coming to an end within a generation. But this very question was the one that American physicist John Richard Gott asked himself, when he visited Berlin one year after the clampdown of the Prague Spring. Those that have a limited lifespan, and those that have an unlimited lifespan. It's just that we don't pay attention to them.” (NRB), This giant asparagus-looking thing is actually the month-old flowering of a massive agave at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden. This principle helps us make predictions. And very like 2014. People at that time wondered how long the Wall might last. I said, Well, there's nothing special about the timing of my visit. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Without prior knowledge this value is set at 2. Also the moment at which I am observing AI research is not really random, as it was in the Doomsday argument created by Gott in 1993, and I probably will not be able to apply it to a time before it become known.