The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World by Tom Chivers

Author:Tom Chivers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781474608800
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2019-06-13T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

The availability heuristic

What’s more likely to kill you: a terrorist attack, or the bath?

I’m not going to insult your intelligence. You know it’s the bath, if for no other reason than the answer to ‘What’s more dangerous, [dangerous-sounding thing] or [not-dangerous-sounding thing]’ is always ‘[not-dangerous-sounding thing]’. But I’m guessing most people, if asked to rank risks, would probably write ‘terrorism’ somewhere above ‘bathtime’. After all, if you live in Britain, you’d have noticed no fewer than five high-profile terror attacks, four in London and one in Manchester, in 2017 alone. They probably wouldn’t have heard of anyone dying in the bath.

But they’d be wrong and you’d be right. Over the last 10 years, there have been fewer than 50 deaths from terrorism on UK soil. (The large majority of them came in 2017, mostly in the awful attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.) That’s an average of about five a year. According to an independent report on UK terrorism legislation carried out in 2012,1 the average annualised death rate from drowning in the bath is 29.

This is an example of a systematic bias called the availability heuristic. When we are asked how likely something is, we could go and add up all the examples of it, divide this figure by the number of times it could possibly have happened, and get the answer. But that’s difficult and takes a long time. What we tend to do, in reality, is to judge how likely something is by how easily we can think of an example; and how easily we can think of one is only loosely related to how often it happens. More dramatic things, which get disproportionate amounts of coverage in the media, are easier to remember. We can easily think of examples of terrorism, because every single one around the world gets reported, with dramatic images of smoke and fire and blood. We can’t easily think of examples of drowning in the bath, because even though they happen far more frequently they don’t make the news, and even when they do they’re unspectacular.

Yudkowsky refers to a study2 which looked at how good people are at assessing risks. It found that subjects ‘thought that accidents caused about as many deaths as disease; thought that homicide was a more frequent cause of death than suicide. Actually, diseases cause about sixteen times as many deaths as accidents, and suicide is twice as frequent as homicide,’3 he writes. This is a problem for various reasons. It leads to bad policies: if the public believes that child abduction is more common than it is, politicians will spend more money than they ought on reducing the risk; if people are more worried about Ebola than diabetes, then we might spend millions policing our airports to stop it coming in and neglect the thousands who die every year of diabetes. And it leads to bad personal decisions: in the years after 9/11, so many more people were afraid of flying, because of terrorism, that there were roughly 2,000 extra deaths on US roads; 300 a month in the first few months.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.