This is an amazing conversation, because Liv is very into objectivity, LessWrong kind of rationality. And it’s a fresh view on the world’s challenges and issues.

• Moloch (video) is a very interesting concept, which describes a lose-lose situation in Game Theory:
  • Instagram filters make photo look better, once it introduced, everyone are forced to use it, because without it you don’t look as nice. The baseline changes for everyone.
  • If someone on a stadium stands up to see better, everyone behind is forced to stand up to return to the same status as before in terms of view, but all standing.
  • It’s hard to tell if changes are possible from within a system under Moloch.
• Existential risk
  • Future pandemic prevention budget shrunk from $60B to $2B in US.
  • Scientific community is very naive.
  • DEEP VZN project (very much against it) that aspires to find all potentially bad pathogens on Earth, study it, create a global database of its genomes and put it to Internet (sic!)
  • Radical honesty would be nice to have from the officials who screwed up and lied to the public — to start restoring public’s trust in institutions.
• AI race is a problem, because there’s no way of ensuring safety. However, the engineers working on it mostly aware and cognizant about the risks.