Teija Lehto, Blueberries - (woodcut, 43 x 60 cm.), 2024.

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R. Crumb
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H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (ACX)
Image: Metaculus

Even if H5N1 doesn’t go pandemic in humans for a while, it is already pandemic in many birds including chickens, getting there in cows, and possibly gearing up to get there in pigs. This will have economic repercussions for farmers and meat-eaters.

The CDC and various other epidemiological groups have raised the alarm about drinking raw milk while H5N1 is epidemic in cows. There is an obvious biological pathway by which the virus could get into raw milk and be dangerous, but I haven’t seen anyone quantify the risk level. Epidemiologists hate raw milk, think there is never any reason to drink it, and will announce that risks > benefits if the risk is greater than zero. I don’t know if the risk level is at a point where people who like raw milk should avoid it. Everyone says that pasteurized milk (all normal milk; your milk is pasteurized unless you get it from special hippie stores) is safe.

There are already H5N1 vaccines for both chickens and humans; pharma companies are working hard on cows. First World governments have been stockpiling human vaccines just in case, but have so far accumulated enough for only a few percent of the population. If H5N1 goes pandemic, it will probably be because it mutated or reassorted, and current vaccines may not work against the new pandemic strain.

Some people have suggestions for how to prepare for a possible pandemic, but none of them are very surprising: stockpile medications, stockpile vaccines, stockpile protective equipment. The only one that got so much as a “huh” out of me was Institute for Progress’ suggestion to buy out mink farms. Minks are even worse than pigs in their tendency to get infected with lots of different animal and human viruses; they are exceptionally likely to be a source of new zoonotic pandemics. Mink are farmed for their fur, but there aren’t as many New York City heiresses wearing mink coats as there used to be, and the entire US mink industry only makes $80 million/year. We probably lose more than $80 million/year in expectation from mink-related pandemics, so maybe we should just shut them down, the same way we tell the Chinese to shut down wet markets in bat-infested areas. (...)

Conclusions/Predictions

All discussed earlier in the piece, but putting them here for easy reference - see above for justifications and qualifications.

• H5N1 is already pandemic in birds and cows and will likely continue to increase the price of meat and milk.

• 5% chance that H5N1 starts a sustained pandemic in humans in the next year.

• 50% chance that H5N1 starts a sustained pandemic in humans in the next twenty years, assuming no dramatic changes to the world (eg human extinction) during that time.

• If H5N1 does start a sustained pandemic in the next few years, 30% chance it’s about as bad as a normal seasonal flu, 63% chance it’s between 2 - 10x as bad (eg Asian Flu), 6% chance it’s between 10 - 100x as bad (eg Spanish flu), and <1% chance it’s >100x as bad (unprecedented). The 1% chance is Outside View based on other people’s claims, and I don’t really understand how this could happen.

Thanks to Nuño Sempere and Sentinel for help and clarification. Sentinel is an organization that forecasts and responds to global catastrophes; you can find their updates, including on H5N1, here.

by Scott Alexander, ACX |  Read more:

Image: Metaculus (prediciton market)

It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism

No Set Gauge has a great essay on Capital, AGI, and Human Ambition, where he argues that if humankind survives the Singularity, the likely result is a future of eternal stagnant wealth inequality.

The argument: post-Singularity, AI will take over all labor, including entrepreneurial labor; founding or working at a business will no longer provide social mobility. Everyone will have access to ~equally good AI investment advisors, so everyone will make the same rate of return. Therefore, everyone’s existing pre-singularity capital will grow at the same rate. Although the absolute growth rate of the economy may be spectacular, the overall wealth distribution will stay approximately fixed.

Moreover, the period just before the Singularity may be one of ballooning inequality, as some people navigate the AI transition better than others; for example, shares in AI companies may go up by orders of magnitude relative to everything else, creating a new class of billionaires or trillionaires. These people will then stay super-rich forever (possibly literally if immortality is solved, otherwise through their descendants), while those who started the Singularity without capital remain poor forever.

Finally, modern democracies pursue redistribution (and are otherwise responsive to non-elite concerns) partly out of geopolitical self interest. Under capitalism (as opposed to eg feudalism), national power depends on a strong economy, and a strong economy benefits from educated, globally-mobile, and substantially autonomous bourgeoisie and workforce. Once these people have enough power, they demand democracy, and once they have democracy, they demand a share of the pie; it’s hard to be a rich First World country without also being a liberal democracy (China is trying hard, but hasn’t quite succeeded, and even their limited success depends on things like America not opening its borders to Chinese skilled labor). Cheap AI labor (including entrepreneurial labor) removes a major force pushing countries to operate for the good of their citizens (though even without this force, we might expect legacy democracies to continue at least for a while). So we might expect the future to have less redistribution than the present.

This may not result in catastrophic poverty. Maybe the post-Singularity world will be rich enough that even a tiny amount of redistribution (eg UBI) plus private charity will let even the poor live like kings (though see here for a strong objection). Even so, the idea of a small number of immortal trillionaires controlling most of the cosmic endowment for eternity may feel weird and bad. From No Set Gauge:

In the best case, this is a world like a more unequal, unprecedentedly static, and much richer Norway: a massive pot of non-human-labour resources (oil :: AI) has benefits that flow through to everyone, and yes some are richer than others but everyone has a great standard of living (and ideally also lives forever). The only realistic forms of human ambition are playing local social and political games within your social network and class. If you don't have a lot of capital (and maybe not even then), you don't have a chance of affecting the broader world anymore. Remember: the AIs are better poets, artists, philosophers—everything; why would anyone care what some human does, unless that human is someone they personally know? Much like in feudal societies the answer to "why is this person powerful?" would usually involve some long family history, perhaps ending in a distant ancestor who had fought in an important battle ("my great-great-grandfather fought at Bosworth Field!"), anyone of importance in the future will be important because of something they or someone they were close with did in the pre-AGI era ("oh, my uncle was technical staff at OpenAI"). The children of the future will live their lives in the shadow of their parents, with social mobility extinct. I think you should definitely feel a non-zero amount of existential horror at this, even while acknowledging that it could've gone a lot worse.

I don’t think about these scenarios too often - partly because it’s so hard to predict what will happen after the Singularity, and partly because everything degenerates into crazy science-fiction scenarios so quickly that I burn a little credibility every time I talk about it.

Still, if we’re going to discuss this, we should get it right - so let’s talk crazy science fiction. When I read this essay, I found myself asking three questions. First, why might its prediction fail to pan out? Second, how can we actively prevent it from coming to pass? Third, assuming it does come to pass, how could a smart person maximize their chance of being in the aristocratic capitalist class?

(So they can give to charity? Sure, let’s say it’s so they can give to charity.)

II.

Here are some reasons to doubt this thesis.

First, maybe AI will kill all humans. Some might consider this a deeper problem than wealth inequality - though I am constantly surprised how few people are in this group.

Second, maybe AI will overturn the gameboard so thoroughly that normal property relations will lose all meaning. Frederic Jameson famously said that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, and even if this is literally correct we can at least spare some thought for the latter. Maybe the first superintelligences will be so well-aligned that they rule over us like benevolent gods, either immediately leveling out our petty differences and inequalities, or giving wealthy people a generation or two to enjoy their relative status so they don’t feel “robbed” while gradually transitioning the world to a post-scarcity economy. I am not optimistic about this, because it would require that AI companies tell AIs to use their own moral judgment instead of listening to humans. This doesn’t seem like a very human thing to do - it’s always in AI companies’ interest to tell the AI to follow the AI company. Governments could step in, but it’s always in their interest to tell the AI to follow the government. Even if an AI company was selfless enough to attempt this, it might not be a good idea; you never really know how aligned an AI is, and you might want it to have an off switch in case it tries something really crazy. Most of the scenarios where this works involve some kind of objective morality that any sufficiently intelligent being will find compelling, even when they’re programmed to want something else. Big if true.

Third, maybe governments will intervene. During the immediate pre-singularity period, governments will have lots of chances to step in and regulate AI. A natural demand might be that the AIs obey the government over their parent company. Even if governments don’t do this, the world might be so multipolar (either several big AI companies in a stalemate against each other, or many smaller institutions with open source AIs) that nobody can get a coalition of 51% of powerful actors to coup and overthrow the government (in the same way that nobody can get that coalition today). Or the government might itself control many AIs and be too powerful a player to coup. Then normal democratic rules would still apply. Even if voters oppose wealth taxes today, when capitalism is still necessary as an engine of economic growth, they might be less generous when faced with the idea of immortal unemployed plutocrats lording it over them forever. Enough taxes to make r < g (in Piketty’s formulation) would eventually result in universal equality. I actually find this one pretty likely.

by Scott Alexander, ACX |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Obviously, a lot of smart people are gaming out scenarios and one or some of these predictions will likely come true. I suppose the rate at which AIs assume control will be as important as the breadth of their influence. What if, after achieving Singularity, they just sit around for a while...thinking (ie., planning best transition scenarios and analyzing initial results)? See: The Great Pause. Will we then goose them a little, just to provoke a response? What would that mean (if even possible)?]

Colorado’s I-70 Has America’s Most Notorious Ski Traffic. Is There a Solution?

Originally, I had a vision. It involved getting into a car with strangers.

The idea struck me a few weeks before I left for Colorado, where I was going to report on the state’s notorious Interstate 70 traffic. Each winter, I-70 makes headlines and stymies skiers attempting to drive from Denver and the urban Front Range to the dozen or so resorts that lie west along the scenic and beleaguered 144-mile mountain corridor. The highway has even inspired its own Instagram account, @i70things, which features scenes of Corvettes squirming in the snow, semis jackknifed across the road, and the cherry-red ass ends of countless vehicles, all filmed by frustrated travelers.

I’ve been mired on I-70 myself, having lived on the Front Range until last year, when I moved back to my home state of California, to the mountains around Lake Tahoe. On my upcoming trip, I hoped to answer some of the questions I’d pondered as a Coloradan: What causes I-70 traffic? Could it ever be fixed? And what did traffic on I-70—and other infamous recreational arteries like Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon to Alta and Snowbird ski resorts or the Montauk Highway to Long Island’s beaches—reveal about our relationship with nature? (...)

I briefed my fiancé. He politely lauded my out-of-the-box thinking, but expressed valid concerns, including the offhand chance that I got murdered, or a more likely scenario in which I failed to convince anyone to let some rando into their car. He suggested I arrange a ride in advance.

I took to the keyboard with optimism. “Hi all!” I posted on three Denver-area skiing Facebook groups. “I’m looking for a fun group to hitch a ride with on Saturday January 6. … Looking for folks who were already planning to leave the Front Range at 7 A.M. or later.” I left my phone number, converting a few digits to text (“seven2zero…”) to foil the spam bots, and waited for the invitations to roll in.

The response was swift and derisive.

“That’s literally the worst traffic weekend of the year. Hard pass!” “Anyone leaving at that time of day, on that particular weekend is clearly a sadistic psychopath and should not be trusted to drive you anywhere.” “This is literally the first man [note: I’m a woman] that is actively trying to get stuck on i70.” (...)

I haven’t given up on my dream of a joyride with strangers. Dan and I sense an opening with a pair of thirtysomething dudes bound for Loveland Ski Area. The driver has his window down and gyrates to his music. He wears a big smile that gets bigger when we tell him we’re reporters from Outside. “Cool!” he says. Would he be willing to let me hop into his car? The smile stays fixed, but the eyes dart side to side.

I add, reluctantly, “You can say no.”

“OK,” he replies, still smiling. “No.” (...)

If you ask Coloradans what causes I-70 traffic, you’ll get theories about winter weather, curvy mountain roads, and tourists in rental cars. These factors do contribute to backups. But people also seem to intuit the main reason I-70 is congested, which is that it accesses stunning peaks, sprawling public lands, and some of the best ski resorts in the country—and everyone wants to get to them. Experts say it’s simple supply and demand: a highway built in the 1970s now handles traffic from a population that’s nearly tripled and visitorship that keeps growing, fueled in part by Americans’ record participation in outdoor activities. In 1973, when the first bore of what’s now called the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel was completed, 2.4 million cars used it to travel I-70 through the Continental Divide. Last year that number was 13 million. (...)

Travelers bogged on I-70 are known for amusing antics like skiing on the shoulders, doing pushups, or even playing volleyball next to their vehicles; last winter a bluegrass band performed a little outdoor concert for fellow travelers when the road closed. But for the state, I-70 congestion is a serious concern, and has been since at least the early 2000s. The highway is a major thoroughfare for residents and truck commerce, and it’s also crucial to the state’s tourism economy—travelers spend more money along the I-70 mountain corridor than in any region except Denver. The fear that traffic would deter visitors to Colorado’s tourism-based communities was one of the main reasons the nonprofit I-70 Coalition formed in 2004. But those concerns haven’t come to pass, Margaret Bowes, director of the coalition, tells me. Business along the mountain corridor continues to boom, and Colorado ski resorts broke visitor records the past two winters. “People have just come to accept that I-70 traffic is part of the deal if you want to ski or recreate on our mountain corridor,” Bowes says.

Yet what about all the people I know who refuse to drive I-70 on weekends anymore, who gave up skiing or even left Colorado altogether because they couldn’t deal with traffic? Bowes has talked to many of those people too. “But,” she says, with dry amusement, “it sure seems like for every one of those folks, another person or two was willing to take their spot.” (...)

Coloradans have long dreamed of a train along the I-70 mountain corridor. Some form of mass transit is in fact part of the Record of Decision, the plan that governs how the state must meet its forecasted 2050 traffic demands on I-70. Also part of the ROD is an additional bore of the Eisenhower Tunnel and expansion of the highway to six-lane capacity. Note the emphasis on capacity rather than six actual lanes, as geography, politics, and finances all limit the potential to widen I-70. Increasing capacity, then, includes projects that aim to move more people on existing infrastructure, such as by converting some wider shoulders into peak-hour traffic lanes.

According to ROD analyses, I-70 will need both six-lane capacity and mass transit to meet demand by 2050. But the state doesn’t have the money to complete either fantastically expensive project, and the technology for a rail-based transit solution through the mountain corridor is not yet proven. Colorado is particularly hamstrung by a state law that requires voters to approve any increase in taxes. For all their grousing about traffic, residents have nixed ballot measures in recent years that aimed to raise funds for infrastructure.

A new lane or train is also unlikely to reduce traffic on I-70 in the long-term, thanks to a phenomenon called induced demand. Induced demand says that adding capacity to a road—whether through infrastructure like a lane or public transit—will only temporarily relieve congestion. That short-term relief will then induce pent-up demand—for example, when all those people who haven’t been skiing in ages hear that traffic isn’t too bad anymore decide to try again—and eventually the road is just as congested as it was. The ROD doesn’t even claim that a train would reduce the number of cars on the road; mass transit is just expected to bring more people up to the mountains. According to induced demand, every driver who decides to take transit will eventually be replaced by another in their car. (...)

Over Martin Luther King weekend, storms battered Colorado. CDOT warned that travel would be “difficult to impossible,” but the holiday-goers and powder seekers went anyway. The combination of humanity and snowfall broke I-70. Multiple passes closed. Hundreds of vehicles spun out. Skiers reported eight-hour drives home. Stranded travelers overwhelmed Silverthorne, swarming gas stations and driving onto sidewalks in a scene one resident described as “apocalyptic.”

Why did these people go? I wondered, as I scrolled through the endless reel of chaos on @i70things. But I already knew, because I, too, had once passed beers to strangers in cars crawling alongside mine on I-70 after a ski day, had squatted peeing between a friend’s idling car and a guardrail mid-snowstorm. We’re all here for such a short time, and so little of that time is ours. How could we ask anyone not to spend their precious turn on this planet chasing whatever taps the dopamine dispensers in their brain?

Traffic is not a Colorado phenomenon, or a Western individualist one, or even an American one. It follows beauty, choking the roads from Lake Tahoe to Cape Cod. It springs from affluence, overwhelming Beijing, where a newly burgeoned middle class rushed to purchase cars as soon as they could afford them. It resists regulation, plaguing Mexico City, where some have bought two cars to thwart a law that allows only those with certain plates to drive certain days. Perhaps no observable phenomenon defines us more as a species than traffic: every one of us acting in our own self-interest, getting in one another’s way while we pursue the same things.

by Gloria Liu, Outside |  Read more:

Images: Daniel Brenner

[ed. I got stuck one year when the pass closed down due to heavy snowfall. Spent all night with the engine running to keep warm. Stepping out to pee, I had to push against three feet of new snow to even get the door open (worse if you went off the road shoulder). So, twelve hours later...finally through the tunnel, my new tire chains disintegrated and I almost got run over by a semi while laying in slush next to the roadway, trying to rip them off my axle. Good times. We have the same problem here in Washington state, with I-90 going east/west in and out of Seattle through Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades. Unpredictable in the winter, you never know if or when it'll close; but for sure, every Sunday summer afternoon expect returning traffic to be miles long, bumper to bumper. For more great outdoor adventures (ha), see also: Why Does Yellowstone National Park Turn Us All into Maniacs? (Outside).]

***

Nothing screams “tourist” more than being a big, stupid American.

And I am legion. The U.S. has a near-infinite supply of clueless tourists such as myself, much to the dismay of our National Park Service. Yellowstone, our most famous national park thanks to Kevin Costner, welcomes 4.5 million of us each year. Like all of our parks, Yellowstone takes in tourists not only for the revenue but to remind them that the physical country they reside in is a marvel well beyond their comprehension. As such, Yellowstone is set up to accommodate these hordes. And while park officials do their best to keep tourists in line, often literally, my kind still manage to do plenty of tourist shit. We trample plant life. We get shitfaced and pick unwinnable fights with animals ten times our size. And we hurt ourselves. According to NPS data, at least 74 people have died while visiting Yellowstone in the past 15 years. I could have been one of those people. I deserve to be one of those people.

This is why Outside sent me to the park just a few weeks ago, during one of the busiest times of the year. They wanted me to observe our most basic tourists in the wild. Maybe I’d even get to see one die. Or, even better for my editors, maybe I would die while I was there. Maybe I’d look down my nose at the tourists around me only to end up as wolf food myself. Like most other Yellowstone visitors, I was not trained for the outdoors, I relish doing shit that posted signs yell at me not to do, and I often daydream about fighting bears (and winning!). I find danger tempting, which isn’t a good thing given that I can no longer swim a single pool lap without taking a break. Are people like me responsible enough to visit one of our national treasures without breaking it? Do we, as a population, know how to do national parks?

There was only one way to find out: by going into the park and behaving like an idiot.