AI and its ability to have broad impacts on society, became much more common topics in news and social media in early 2023 with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT. US Presidential debates, however, generally focus on a set of more narrowly framed...

Launched Mon, 05 Sept 1977 at 12:56:00 UTC, Voyager 1 has intrepidly made its way all the way to interstellar space. Wow. The probe carries with it mementos from Earth, including the so-called Golden Record. Per NASA, this phonograph is "a 12-inch...

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, the number of nuclear-armed states has slowly increased, with nine countries currently possessing nuclear weapons. Nuclear nonproliferation efforts, such as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons...

Article 5 of the North Atlantic treaty outlines the terms of members' "collective self defense":

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and...

In the last 75 years, two nuclear weapons have been detonated as an act of war; the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, at the end of WWII. Despite tensions being high between the US and the USSR during the Cold War, and several close calls,...

Robin Hanson and Alex Tabarrok disagree on whether there will be AI generated religions. Tabarrok thinks there will, Hanson thinks there won't: https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1717539723781230772

In the aftermath of Venezuela's disputed presidential election on July 28, 2024, where incumbent Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner, the government has begun investigating opposition leaders. The justice minister, Tarek William Saab, announced...

The Internet Archive maintains a digital lending library that lends out digital copies of books it has in its physical possession, such that one physical copy corresponds to one digital copy for lending.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and the initial...

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was enacted in 1970 and established a process for the review of the environmental impact of projects within the federal purview. It also established the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), an office of...

QS World University Rankings:

The QS World University Rankings is a prominent ranking system for universities globally. It considers various factors like academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty-student ratio, research citations, and...

There have been great improvements in medical technology in the last few centuries, which has led to very significant increases in <a href=' https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy'>life expectancy</a>. Yet, while medical technology has stopped...

Telegram Open Network was a cryptocurrency project that would allow to make transactions within Telegram messenger. It was cancelled after a lawsuit initiated by the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) in the USA.

After that, a group of developers...

On May 31st, 2022, prominent deep learning skeptic and NYU professor emeritus Gary Marcus challenged Elon Musk to a bet on AGI by the end of 2029. His proposed bet consisted of 5 AI achievements, of which he predicted no more than 2 would come to...

For further context and motivation for this and other questions in this tournament on nuclear proliferation, force sizes, or yields, and a list of such questions, see here.

The total yield across all arsenals depends on both the number of weapons in...

Please take this question not as an expression of partisan blood-lust ("Lock him up!"), but as an exercise in conjunctive probabilities.

Donald J. Trump may or may not have committed crimes during his tenure as President, during his campaign, or...

Related Questions on Metaculus:

• If there's a nuclear conflict involving >1000 detonations, will that cause >4 billion fatalities within 10 years?

• If there's a nuclear conflict involving >100 detonations, will that cause >1 billion fatalities...

Blake Masters) is a Republican politician and a candidate for the United States Senate in Arizona. He has a close relationship with tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and wrote the book Zero to One based on notes he took from Thiel's class at Stanford,...

The next Australian Federal Election is expected between August 2024 and May 2025. A typical election is for every seat in the lower house — the House of Representatives — and half the seats in the upper house — the Senate. This question concerns the...