I shouldn’t tell you this...

i've spent my entire life telling you information i think you should know from how radioactive lava was created at the chernobyl meltdown to what exactly it would feel like to have a large vampire mommy step right on your face critical information but it's very rarely that i or anyone else in this business asks what you shouldn't know what i should not tell you for example i probably shouldn't tell you that you can make a nuclear bomb go instantly critical if you just banana peel yeah arya just redacted that information because it's constituting an info hazard can you imagine what it'd be like if i just told all of you that now entering the facility you live in an age where you have more access to more information than any human has ever had in history today a 10 year old could quickly hop on the internet and learn more about the natural world than even someone like plato or aristotle knew and then the 10 year old would probably tell you that you also suck at fortnite we have an idea that this is a good thing not fortnite but knowledge in general and that knowledge is always better more of it but is this always the case this is the question raised by so-called info hazards first described in the literature by dr nick bostrom the very same philosopher who came up with the now world famous simulation theory that people like elon musk won't shut up about dr bostrom defines info hazards thusly the dissemination or potential dissemination of true information that can cause harm or enable an agent to cause harm you're already actively on the lookout for some kinds of info hazards even though they feel somewhat esoteric for example if i was to start talking about game of thrones and then say you know game of thrones is that show that you would probably want a spoiler warning first because spoilers true information that causes some psychological harm to you and they are therefore info hazards other info hazards however are much more subtle and better written yeah i'm still taking shots who cares it was years ago in 2003 the popular children's film finding nemo grossed almost a billion dollars at the box office shortly thereafter the sale of actual clownfish to private and public aquariums spiked by over 40 percent the movie therefore constituted what's called an attention hazard for the species worldwide attention was brought on the already known fact that clownfish are pretty adorable and so depopulation and overfishing resulted a similar attention hazard is a so-called streisand effect in the very same year 2003 mega singer superstar barbara streisand tried to remove this photo of her home from the internet instead instead of being seen by just two of her lawyers the internet had its attention called down upon the photo and it was viewed by 420 000 people and now you in the very first month but it's not just the content of the information that matters to an info hazard it's also the presentation uh what are we a youtube trending page right now it's gross ui why do we dislike so-called click bait well it misleads us with promises of information that is never fulfilled and at the very least it wastes our time and makes information seem more important than it otherwise is clickbait therefore represents a distraction and or temptation hazard it hijacks our brains desire to know certain things like secrets and gossip and what the current gun in fortnite is uh who cares distraction info hazards harm us in that our finite attentional resources could arguably be better used elsewhere i'd argue that social media is as ubiquitous and popular as it is because it has perfectly weaponized itself as a distraction info hazard it rewards and promotes those who distract the best and it's also a biasing info hazard by virtue of the algorithms that run social media and an information burying info hazard because it can use billions of users to flood out good information with misinformation disinformation and completely irrelevant information like how k-pop fans are yeah i probably shouldn't have said that publicly they are though it is weird how they it is weird how they are potential info hazards come in all sizes and shapes much like kylie jenner on instagram for example take the knowing too much info hazard now i don't know how it was for you when you were in school but it wasn't the coolest thing in the world to get straight a's and take homework and studying super super seriously nerds geeks dweebs freakazoids they get bullied partly because they in fact know too much it's an infohazard and now that i'm older think of me and all the knowledge i've accumulated here at the facility this makes me a potential target you think people don't want to come in here and learn how to make a crocodile speak english of course they do that's awesome but they can't get in here so i'm not worried we have lasers so many lasers another related info hazard is all of society agreeing upon what is good information for example our justice system depends almost wholly on the fact that we consider people personally responsible for their actions but if i was to suddenly disseminate to the world the rather robust neurophysiological evidence that free will does not in fact exist this could be a grand unveiling hazard for a great many people and institutions would people go crazy how would society handle all this when people start turning to crime again i don't care you can't get in here because of the lasers because of the lasers now we could go through a number of more fun examples of info hazards dr bostrom developed an entire topology of infohazards in his paper but unfortunately it's time to get a lot more serious than kylie jenner's instagram or talking crocodiles because in the age of the internet and in rapidly developing technologies we need to exercise our imaginations and think of info hazards that are so much worse than this info hazards like how you can just make we have to do this for our own sake i want you to imagine what would easily be a worst case scenario infohazard a data hazard think of a lone actor maybe a general in the united states military who compiles collects collates disseminates step-by-step instructions for making a homemade nuclear bomb in your basement imagine this information being uploaded to the dark web and going viral as we've gone through a number of times on this program there's good data to believe that even a single detonation one person in a united states city would plunge the globe into another recession force tens of millions of people into poverty and vaporize tens of thousands of people if not hundreds of thousands instantly think of the infrastructure the surveillance that you'd want in place digitally to prevent this kind of information from getting out think of the freedoms that we would have to give up just prevent some lone lunatic from causing nuclear armageddon for increasing dramatically our risk of existential extermination but kyle i hear you saying who would do such a thing who would release such information ending information online well you say that in 1918 a strain of influenza dubbed the spanish flu infected about a third of the human population on planet earth it killed an estimated 40 million people and was the worst pandemic in human history fast forward to less than a hundred years later in 1997 some of the very smartest scientists in the world were able to reconstruct a strain of the spanish flu from preserved human lung tissue and then they published this paper which is freely available online and i was able to find it within about 30 seconds this is the complete genome for that strain of 1918 flu and the instructions for how they made it one of the deadliest events in human history contained in data right there free for you right now thankfully there's still only a few people on the planet that can do anything with information like this but that won't always be the case a data hazard like this will likely be enabled soon if we don't do anything because of the unstoppable march of technological progress just a few years ago a supercomputer looked like that it was the size of an entire building you would need a forklift to lift just a few megabytes literally now fast forward less than three human generations and a supercomputer looks like this it fits in my pocket it's vastly more powerful and it can enable me to buy dogecoin in just milliseconds incredible the exponential increase of computer technology has been amazing across all variables that matter now i mentioned the speed of technological progress here to mention this biotechnology is now on a similar rocket-powered pace in less than a hundred years medicine has already doubled the human life expectancy in 2003 the human genome project finished in a little over 10 years for 3 billion dollars they read out the entire human dna blueprint now i can do that same thing in a couple days for 300 after spitting into a tube and mailing it to somebody this is a 10 million fold decrease in price and difficulty it's probably inevitable that biotechnology will progress to the point where it goes from the best labs in the world to like reading dna your desk for a couple days and a couple hundred dollars think of the data info hazard this represents when the information to make the deadliest plague in human history is already released and freely available online this would be so much worse than releasing step-by-step instructions for a nuclear bomb online would humanity once technology progresses to that point survive something like a synthetic pandemic that some lunatic can create at their desk at home humanity barely survives natural pandemics and more of those are coming too humans have a truth bias we have an idea that we should ask and answer as much as we possibly can release it to everyone more knowledge is always better but i wanted to jolt you out of this bias a little bit today because i believe that today now more than ever infohazards do represent a unique existential threat yes most of the time because we can convey and communicate to more people than at any other time in human history most of the time it will be harmless it'll be cat gifts and looking at kylie jenner on instagram even though she why can't i anyway most of the time it will be harmless but we've been lucky up until now it seems like it's inevitable that there will be some development or discovery or ideology that will challenge our notion that more knowledge is better i'll leave you with one example the last person to die to the population obliterating disease known as smallpox was janet parker in 1978. she died after smallpox was eradicated from the face of the earth how well she was a medical photographer working in a university hospital below her were a team of scientists that had grown synthesized and were studying a strain of smallpox somehow it got out and you may not have noticed but with me the whole time staring you right in the face is the complete genome for that strain of smallpox freely available online is more information always better until next time now exiting the facility thank you so much to the vern nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant the signal hill gang yay and visiting scholar natalie skipworth if you want to join the facility if you want to join the over 1500 patrons who have draped on a silky white lab coat get episodes early get behind the scenes photos get private members only live streams with me not like that you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and join the facility today and hey if you support us just enough you get your name on arya here each and every week and as you can see there's hundreds and hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the t you know i know i got a little dark at the end of this episode with info hazards but it's a episode about hazards so some of them have to be quite serious and i bring all this up because i believe it is now objectively true that at least in the us we have failed the covet 19 dress rehearsal pandemic there is no evolutionary reason why the next pandemic which is coming will be more deadly and more infectious so if we don't deal with these questions now and we don't learn from our mistakes when something like a real info hazard like we've been talking about comes along it's going to be so so so much worse but again i'll be in here you'll be out there you need to worry about it thanks for watching i'm not working on anything like that

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 479,640

Rating: 4.9329309 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, SCP, infohazard, information hazard, cogitohazard, nick bostrom, simulation theory, synthetic pandemic, smallpox, nuclear weapons

Id: 9ccNuAAAIn4

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021