Accelerating Future Transhumanism, AI, nanotech, the Singularity, and extinction risk.

Another Free DVD from the Nuclear Threat Initiative

It's called the Nuclear Tipping Point, and I wish they'd market it more aggressively to youngsters as well as the older set, but unfortunately their marketing crew is just too damn old. I mean no disrespect to older folks (after all, I plan to live for hundreds of thousands of years), it's just that younger folks seem to get more rallied up and enthusiastic over causes, and we need that here. I don't think that a grim academic perspective is very useful for real action either. Important causes start in academia, but can't stay there.

The last movie this laudable organization put out was called Last Best Chance. It's funny because it's overly self-serious and Fred Thompson is President in it.

This latest movie has even more famous old men in it than the last one, and it's totally free. Famous old men featured include Colin Powell, Arnie, and everyone's favorite controversial-as-hell Secretary of State, Mr. Realpolitik himself, Henry.

It's sad how the people who invented the nuclear bomb and spent their careers dealing with the threat of it are now screaming about the risk of terrorist nuclear weapons, and no one under the age of 40 is listening. Few people over 40 are listening either, but the numbers seem better there. (Obama, most notably.) Perhaps it will take a nuke going off in one of our major cities before people wake up. There's this thing called a boat that lets you bring a payload right up to the coast without too much trouble.

My generation is too interested in webcomics, MMOs, perpetual left-right political warfare, and gosh-wow technologies to care about the real risks right in front of us.

Here's Colin Powell.

Here's the blurb:

The film is introduced by General Colin Powell, narrated by Michael Douglas and includes interviews with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. "Nuclear Tipping Point" was written and directed by Ben Goddard and produced by the Nuclear Security Project in an effort to raise awareness about nuclear threats and to help build support for the urgent actions needed to reduce nuclear dangers.

For those concerned about existential risks, try to first see if you can get anyone interested in plausible non-existential risks. That can set a baseline for the level of success you expect to achieve for existential, longer-term threats like AGI.