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The history of geoengineering, nuclear power, and human challenge trials suggest that social norms and regulation exert powerful forces on the use of technology.

Chaos theory allows us to rigorously show that there are ceilings on our abilities to make some prediction. This post introduces an investigation which explores the relationship between chaos and intelligence in more detail.

The uncertainty in the location of the pinball grows by a factor of about 5 every time the ball collides with one of the disks. After 12 bounces, an initial uncertainty in position the size of an atom grows to be as large as the disks themselves. Since you cannot measure the location of a pinball with more than atom-scale precision, it is in principle impossible to predict the motion of a pinball as it bounces between the disks for more than 12 bounces.

Every survey respondent’s guess about the future, lined up by expectation of the worst.

ChatGPT had unusually fast user growth, but it did not set a record.