We investigate the salience of extinction risk as a source of impatience. Our framework distinguishes between human extinction risk and individual mortality risk while allowing for various degrees of intergenerational altruism. Additionally, we consider the evolutionarily motivated "selfish gene" perspective. We find that the risk of human extinction is an indispensable component of the discount rate, whereas individual mortality risk can be hedged against - partially or fully, depending on the setup - through human reproduction. Overall, we show that in the face of extinction risk, people become more impatient rather than more farsighted. Thus, the greater the threat of extinction, the less incentive there is to invest in avoiding it. Our framework can help explain why humanity consistently underinvests in mitigation of catastrophic risks, ranging from climate change mitigation, via pandemic prevention, to addressing the emerging risks of transformative artificial intelligence.

It's been well over a decade since I finished a Cognitive Architectures course at MIT (9.364) under the late professor Whitman Richards. My final project was a little thing called "Agent Collaboration Using Anigrafs." Anigrafs were a pedagogical cognitive architecture that Richards defined. I wrote some code to implement Anigrafs and hooked it to simulated robots, which I called "Anibots." What follows is essentially my 2008 final report to Prof. Richards. I noticed several years later that he published Anigrafs: Experiments in Cooperative Cognitive Architecture as a book from MIT Press. TLDR: Identical robots can cooperate if they use a type of mental network that votes (with the Condorcet method) on what behavior to do next. The development goal is to achieve collaboration of situated agents to perform shared tasks and/or goals.

The theory of natural selection is a masterpiece, probably the most compelling idea ever. If you haven't read Charles Darwin, then The Genius of Charles Darwin is an uncommonly good television documentary written and presented by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins uses the term "Selfish Gene" as a means of expressing the gene-centered view of evolution in his book "Selfish Gene". From the gene's point of view, evolutionary success ultimately depends on leaving behind the maximum number of copies of itself in the population. It reveals that, in such a competition, the more efficient replicators increase in number at the expense of their less efficient competitors.

As you went about your day quietly humming it, perhaps someone else heard you and complained minutes later that you'd gotten the tune stuck in their head. The song's hook seems to have the ability to jump from one brain to another. And perhaps, to jump from the web browser you are using right now to your brain. In fact, you may be singing the hook to yourself right now. Something similar happens on the internet when things go viral – seeming to follow no rhyme or reason, people are compelled to like, share, retweet or participate in things online.