A website now rates the probability of human extinction on a scale of 1 to 5. What does it say and does it help?

[HeartbreakKid92]

NeuralBuddies covered a project this week from a Los Angeles programmer and artist named Kyle McDonald that scores the probability of various apocalyptic scenarios on a 1 to 5 scale using AI assessment. The project takes current news and risk factors and attempts to produce a running assessment of extinction-level and civilisational-collapse level risks.

The concept is somewhere between a genuine risk dashboard and an art project about how we process existential anxiety. The question for the forum is whether making that kind of risk visible and quantified actually helps people think about it or just adds another source of low-grade dread to the information diet

[Priya_39]

Quantifying existential risk into a 1 to 5 score does what all quantification does: makes something feel manageable and precise that is neither. The false precision is as likely to mislead as to inform

[KnotKnull]

I would genuinely use a well-calibrated AI risk dashboard if it was honest about its uncertainty. The problem is that nobody knows how to calibrate these probabilities and the uncertainty intervals would be enormous

[FridayFeeling]

There is a school of thought in risk communication that making risks visible and rated helps people engage with them rather than avoiding them. The question is whether this implements that correctly

[Rocket67]

Kyle McDonald making this as an art project rather than a research tool is probably the honest framing. It asks a question about how we relate to existential risk more than it answers one

[Shane95]

The running joke is that the score went up 0.3 this week because of the OpenClaw vulnerabilities and down 0.1 because of the Pope's AI encyclical and the net result is the same number

[Current]

Humans are notoriously bad at intuiting very small and very large probabilities. A 1 to 5 scale is not the right tool for communicating risks that differ by orders of magnitude