How Vulnerable Is the World?
aeon.co
How Vulnerable Is the World?
1–10 of 64 posts
Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?
#2I don't worry about easy nukes but I do worry about easy viruses, especially now that we've seen what a pandemic can do. Virus construction is only going to become easier over time, and at some point, you could imagine any run of the mill biochem lab capable of "printing" a new strain of some infectious disease.
Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?
#3I don't think we need to worry about any new fancy technologies wiping us out. Nature is perfectly capable of doing that itself. My biggest question with the whole COVID issue is why hasn't this happened sooner? And why only one single pathogen? Why aren't there dozens of COVIDs happening all the time? What happens when we get 2, 3, 4, 5 of them at once with a 10% IFR each? I don't think our civilization would be able to cope. Things would get medieval really quickly.
Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?
#4I'm not ok with the article. The analogy of taking balls from an urn put the focus on the technology and not in the people that may or not use it. Those omited but important players is what makes the difference for some existing technologies to be black or not.
And the solution, for technologies that may be used by a wide amount of players, is to rely on surveillance and again, giving even more power those top/ruling players on top.
We already got a dark gray ball out of the urn, when the atomic bomb was tested at first some scientists on the project weren't sure if that wouldn't start a chain reaction on the atmosphere killing all life. And still, the people in power went ahead and used that technology.
Another example is more recent, with global warming, the people in power are ignoring the long term risks and taking measures making the problem worse and more urgent.
So, is not just taking the ball. Some of them could be already black (nuclear power, genetic manipulation, things that cause global warming, etc). Is to have the power and the will to use them. And with that in mind, last US presidency showed us how vulnerable is the world.
Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?
#5It's hard not to throw your hands up in the air and say "Well, if it turns out there's a black ball then I guess humanity just wasn't meant to make it" when the only realistic defense against the apocalyptic risidual is a as-yet hypothetical totally effective panopticon surveillance. Moreover, as the essay says; collective action problems have thusfar been total shitshows, even though the stakes are crazy high.
Yeah, the article says that so far humanity's approach has just been "hope there isn't a black ball" and we know that hoping isn't a tactic; but the alternative (global collaboration and perfect adherence) seems impossible even in the ideal.
So, yeah. My personal tactic has been "live a good life while you can, pitching in where you can". Humanity really needs an "Arrival" scenario to get our shit together before a black ball annihilates us.
Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?
#6It's hard not to throw your hands up in the air and say "Well, if it turns out there's a black ball then I guess humanity just wasn't meant to make it" when the only realistic defense against the apocalyptic risidual is a as-yet hypothetical totally effective panopticon surveillance. Moreover, as the essay says; collective action problems have thusfar been total shitshows, even though the stakes are crazy high. Yeah,…
> global collaboration and perfect adherence
i don't think the world needs perfect adherence. What keeps blowing my mind so many years after it happened is still what happened to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs).
I still try to understand (I was too young back than) why the world (more or less) united in the quest after Reagan and Thatcher took up the cause.
For me it still shows it is possible. But sadly I fear it became way less likely.
Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?
#7It will probably be the stuff "hidden" (it's really not, our eyes are just closed) behind many layers that will do us in on a major scale.
While worrying about nuclear weapons and weaponized viruses, we're strip mining the planet dry, creating extremely resource consuming stuff just to throw it in a landfill every year, while at the same time pumping the atmosphere and soil full of shit that kills plant life and other animals.
So, when this process inevitably leads to a catastrophic breakdown of the planet and human society, we'll be like "ah shit, all the signs were there, but we didn't do anything".
We should preemptively build a memorial for all the human lives that will be lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjfrJzdx7DA
Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?
#8Don't forget the anthropic principal: the reason we haven't yet encountered any civilization-destroying black balls is because we wouldn't be here to wonder why if we had.
Similarly, there's a probabilistic argument that we actually are on the cusp of some humanity-destroying event. If human population grows exponentially until it faces a civilization-destroying crisis, then a large fraction of the people who will ever be born will be born in the last lifetime before the cataclysm, because this is the nature of exponential growth. Hence, for any given observer, chances are they see the end of civilization.
(Changing population growth rates can alter this prediction somewhat: I've read that only about 10% of all humans who have ever lived are alive now, because we had several millenia of relative stagnation & steady-state population. That implies that if we don't see a cataclysm, though, there will be more stagnation ahead.)
Finally, don't rule out the possibility that the definition of "consciousness" may shift. Is a bacteria self-aware? Nobody's ever really asked one. They do communicate via chemical signals, though. [1] What if in the future, humanity's role is essentially like cells in a great planetary-scale organization, and we have planets asking each other "Do we need to worry about the destruction of the galaxy?"
Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?
#9I don't think we need to worry about any new fancy technologies wiping us out. Nature is perfectly capable of doing that itself. My biggest question with the whole COVID issue is why hasn't this happened sooner? And why only one single pathogen? Why aren't there dozens of COVIDs happening all the time? What happens when we get 2, 3, 4, 5 of them at once with a 10% IFR each? I don't think our civilization would be abl…
I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but here are some responses.
There have been many pandemics throughout human history, including recent human history, so it's odd to ask "why hasn't this happened sooner?" There are also, at any given time, many pathogens which can and do infect and harm humans. They vary a lot in their symptoms and infection rates, but most are endemic rather than epidemic or pandemic. "Pandemic" just means the pathogen is extremely widespread and is infecting large numbers of people in a relatively short period of time. Various health organizations and writers use different precise definitions, but some still consider HIV/AIDS to also be pandemic.
Re: How Vulnerable Is the World?
#10I don't worry about easy nukes but I do worry about easy viruses, especially now that we've seen what a pandemic can do. Virus construction is only going to become easier over time, and at some point, you could imagine any run of the mill biochem lab capable of "printing" a new strain of some infectious disease.
Activating tin-foil hat
Maybe Covid was 'printed'...?