jonathansalter

Hello Bill Nye! Thank you for doing this AMA!

Quite recently, prominent figures such as Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and many more have raised concerns about what's known as artificial superintelligence (or ASI for short) triggered by professor Nick Boström's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

My questions are:

• Are you acquainted with the concept of existential risk and superintelligence, and of the truly enormous importance that we avoid existential threats?
• As a prominent public figure working on important issues, mightn't you use your influence to raise awareness of this issue, in which inconceivable expected utility functions are involved, which by far outstrip the importance of preventing climate change from doing too much harm, and bringing skepticism and science to the public?

Thanks for your time :)

Here are some excellent resources for understanding more about this:

• A very popular two part series (1, 2) going in depth on superintelligence in a very pedagogical way.

• Nick Boström's website, where you can find all his papers.

• Nick Boström's TED Talks (1,2,3)

Hi Dr Müller! Long time viewer, and we've also met, in Stockholm in March of 2014, which was an awesome experience!

I was wondering whether you could speculate on what the future of YouTube is? What do you think YouTube is going to be like 10 years down the line?

Also, do you have any favourite documentaries/science series (besides your own)? My favourite so far are the original Cosmos and Connections with James Burke.

Thanks for doing this AMA Derek, I've done my best to promote your content on Reddit as promised!

Derek, this is my special field of interest so I'd like to comment on this. Your position is an understandable one if you only have heard about the risk from AI from mainstream media outlets and some tweets from people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, but have you read the now standard arguments for why superintelligence is possible and extremely dangerous? You should take a look at Nick Boström's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, an excellent and very in depth guide to the subject of smarter-than-human agents.

I've thought about it a fair bit, and it seems plausible to me that YouTube in 2025 will know your preferences and habits so well that you'll just sit down and watch a custom made playlist, that YouTube will have swallowed a lot of other video services and that there'll be a lot more YouTube exclusive big budget productions, and that starting a new channel and getting big will be almost impossible. Also, I wonder how it's going to work with VR content: how do you show recorded VR content on VR device without someone getting dizzy (as the head movement of the person playing the game or whatever will obviously not make your own head move).

Have you considered traveling to meet fans again?

Hello Prof. Cox, what do you hold to be the most marvellous fact about the Cosmos?