New Year 2025 - change and uncertainty remain the themes

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As the calendar year of 2024 draws to a close, the time for rest, recreation and reflection on the past year and consideration of the year ahead is a time-honoured pastime. 2024 was a difficult year and does provide a partial events map of what may eventuate in 2025. A few critical influences to consider are listed below -

International relations: the Russian (Putin-initiated) unilateral war on Ukraine continues into another year with the exacting and tragic toll of civilian life unabated. The outcome is unknown as there are, like most major military conflicts, many variables whether political, technological (military)or social that will impact the course of the conflict. The war is one which does draw in multiple parties and cannot be defined only as regional conflict. The election of Donald J Trump as US President may affect the continuation of the war or it may not. 

The Middle East remains a hotbed of turmoil with the ongoing Israel-Palestinian (Hamas) conflict together with the action taken by Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon being central. The wildcard change has been the fall of the Assad regime in Syria that has been replaced by a collection of groups that formed the opposition to his dictatorship. Syria at present is geographically divided into different zones under various groups. Whether a cohesive multi-religious state can emerge from this situation is pure guesswork but the odds are not in favour of this outcome. Yemen and the Houthi insurgency continues to add a smaller yet measurable level of Middle Eastern instability.

Politics: the returning US President, Donald J Trump takes office in January 2025. Given the experience of Trump politics in the first Trump presidency,  a fairly chaotic four years is the likely result. In the UK, the election of a Labour Government in July 2024 under Sir Keir Starmer has surprisingly led to a series of scandals in the first few months thus removing any sense of even a honeymoon period for the new leadership. In Europe, the Right of the political spectrum have gained much stronger positions in Holland, Italy, France, Austria and Germany reflecting considerable dissatisfaction with centrist or moderate left wing governments. There is no sign of this trend reversing in the next 12 months. Elsewhere totalitarian regimes continue in Russia, China and North Korea.

Economies: Economic instability and volatility will continue in 2025 with even more fluctuations as the Trump US Presidency gets underway and continuing conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East . The real risk of either increased inflationary pressures or conversely stagflation cannot be underestimated. The slow-down in China exacerbated by the real estate/property development bubble then decline has proven to be difficult to counter and China's government has chosen the less effective policies to deal with it. 

Environment and Climate Change: irrespective of what government is in power or what conflicts are occuring, the climate will change due to the increase in termperature with carbon emissions continuing at a high level and the risk of the release of higher methane emissions in the Northern Hemisphere ever more likely. Ice sheets and glaciers continue to melt at a higher than projected rate and sea level rises are correspondingly continuing. The reality that the agreed limitation of temperature increase to 1.5C cannot be met has yet to be formally acknowledged although many climate scientists have published that conclusion. Any reduction in the efforts to reduce carbon emissions and/or not move to sustainable renewable energy generation would lead to a dismal outcome for the planet and the human race. Each and every year counts at this point in time.

2025 at this stage promises more of the same from this perspective. At a more positive level there are many more ongoing discoveries in science and health and hope for the future is not to be discounted.

Wherever you are living in the world, may 2025 be a healthy, happy and peaceful year.  

Remembrance Day 2024 - the 11th of November

                                                       Shutterstock - Australian War Memorial

 

Remembrance Day or Armistice Day commemorates the end of fighting for the First World War (WWI) when hostilities between Germany and the Allies ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 on the Western Front. Germany signed the Armistice agreement with the Allies at 5.45 AM that day. Since then, every year at the same time, day and month, a minute's silence is observed and the last post is played in memory of those who gave their lives.

Lest we forget.

ANZAC Day 2024 - historical images

Australians at war (courtesy of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, Australia)

photo: the Australian Light Horse camp at Belah, Palestine, 1918

Photo: an Australian Machine Gun Battalion, England, Aug 1940

Photo: the 2nd AIF marches past in Sydney, January 1940

2024 - The New Year beckons

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The start of the new year of 2024 is approaching... with a large number of unknown factors at play both domestically and internationally, it would not be surprising to find many people looking at the next 12 months with some trepidation. Serious armed conflicts in various parts of the world, increasing impacts of climate change, destabilising political movements in liberal democracies, economic uncertainties all contribute to a sense of general unease. More than ever its important to connect with each other, with friends and family to provide a measure of social network support. 

Happy New Year wherever you may reside.

What chance for humanity ?

 Is there really a 1 in 6 chance of human extinction this century?

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Steven Stern, Bond University

In 2020, Oxford-based philosopher Toby Ord published a book called The Precipice about the risk of human extinction. He put the chances of “existential catastrophe” for our species during the next century at one in six.

It’s quite a specific number, and an alarming one. The claim drew headlines at the time, and has been influential since – most recently brought up by Australian politician Andrew Leigh in a speech in Melbourne.

It’s hard to disagree with the idea we face troubling prospects over the coming decades, from climate change, nuclear weapons and bio-engineered pathogens (all big issues in my view), to rogue AI and large asteroids (which I would see as less concerning).

But what about that number? Where does it come from? And what does it really mean?

Coin flips and weather forecasts

To answer those questions, we have to answer another first: what is probability?

The most traditional view of probability is called frequentism, and derives its name from its heritage in games of dice and cards. On this view, we know there is a one in six chance a fair die will come up with a three (for example) by observing the frequency of threes in a large number of rolls.

Or consider the more complicated case of weather forecasts. What does it mean when a weatherperson tells us there is a one in six (or 17%) chance of rain tomorrow?

It’s hard to believe the weatherperson means us to imagine a large collection of “tomorrows”, of which some proportion will experience precipitation. Instead, we need to look at a large number of such predictions and see what happened after them.

If the forecaster is good at their job, we should see that when they said “one in six chance of rain tomorrow”, it did in fact rain on the following day one time in every six.

So, traditional probability depends on observations and procedure. To calculate it, we need to have a collection of repeated events on which to base our estimate.

Can we learn from the Moon?

So what does this mean for the probability of human extinction? Well, such an event would be a one-off: after it happened, there would be no room for repeats.

Instead, we might find some parallel events to learn from. Indeed, in Ord’s book, he discusses a number of potential extinction events, some of which can potentially be examined in light of a history.

Counting craters on the Moon can gives us clues about the risk of asteroid impacts on Earth. NASA

For example, we can estimate the chances of an extinction-sized asteroid hitting Earth by examining how many such space rocks have hit the Moon over its history. A French scientist named Jean-Marc Salotti did this in 2022, calculating the odds of an extinction-level hit in the next century at around one in 300 million.

Of course, such an estimate is fraught with uncertainty, but it is backed by something approaching an appropriate frequency calculation. Ord, by contrast, estimates the risk of extinction by asteroid at one in a million, though he does note a considerable degree of uncertainty.

A ranking system for outcomes

There is another way to think about probability, called Bayesianism after the English statistician Thomas Bayes. It focuses less on events themselves and more on what we know, expect and believe about them.

In very simple terms, we can say Bayesians see probabilities as a kind of ranking system. In this view, the specific number attached to a probability shouldn’t be taken directly, but rather compared to other probabilities to understand which outcomes are more and less likely.

Ord’s book, for example, contains a table of potential extinction events and his personal estimates of their probability. From a Bayesian perspective, we can view these values as relative ranks. Ord thinks extinction from an asteroid strike (one in a million) is much less likely than extinction from climate change (one in a thousand), and both are far less likely than extinction from what he calls “unaligned artificial intelligence” (one in ten).

The difficulty here is that initial estimates of Bayesian probabilities (often called “priors”) are rather subjective (for instance, I would rank the chance of AI-based extinction much lower). Traditional Bayesian reasoning moves from “priors” to “posteriors” by again incorporating observational evidence of relevant outcomes to “update” probability values.

And once again, outcomes relevant to the probability of human extinction are thin on the ground.

Subjective estimates

There are two ways to think about the accuracy and usefulness of probability calculations: calibration and discrimination.

Calibration is the correctness of the actual values of the probabilities. We can’t determine this without appropriate observational information. Discrimination, on the other hand, simply refers to the relative rankings.

We don’t have a basis to think Ord’s values are properly calibrated. Of course, this is not likely to be his intent. He himself indicates they are mostly designed to give “order of magnitude” indications.

Even so, without any related observational confirmation, most of these estimates simply remain in the subjective domain of prior probabilities.

Not well calibrated – but perhaps still useful

So what are we to make of “one in six”? Experience suggests most people have a less than perfect understanding of probability (as evidenced by, among other things, the ongoing volume of lottery ticket sales). In this environment, if you’re making an argument in public, an estimate of “probability” doesn’t necessarily need to be well calibrated – it just needs to have the right sort of psychological impact.

From this perspective, I’d say “one in six” fits the bill nicely. “One in 100” might feel small enough to ignore, while “one in three” might drive panic or be dismissed as apocalyptic raving.

As a person concerned about the future, I hope risks like climate change and nuclear proliferation get the attention they deserve. But as a data scientist, I hope the careless use of probability gets left by the wayside and is replaced by widespread education on its true meaning and appropriate usage.

Steven Stern, Professor of Data Science, Bond University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.