[ExI] Planetary defense

[Anders Sandberg]

Kelly Anderson wrote:
> On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 3:45 AM, Tom Nowell <nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>   
>> bioweapons, AGI & nanotech, Wars, Climate change
>>     
>
> Can't we all just agree that clean water is worth working on? Or how
> about the indoor use of charcoal?
>
> Or is that stuff just too third world for people to care about?
>   

Apples and oranges (i.e different but comparable along a few 
dimensions). Water and charcoal kills many people every day, and on 
average more people die of them than any of the above GCRs. But were a 
serious GCR to happen, it might kill *far* more people - or all of them. 
So do you focus on the average case, the past average, the long-term 
average or the tail risk?

While the mundane threats - water, sanitation, local pollution, food - 
are a bit unsexy, doing something about the big threats often suffer 
from either paralysis (they seem too big) or silliness bias (they are 
not 'real'). Far more work is spent on intermediate threats that might 
rationally be lower priority, like terrorism or certain diseases. The 
biggest problem is that people do not work or fund risk mitigation in 
any particularly rational way..

I think the rational approach here is to go for the big wins and they 
are likely at both ends of the scale. There are low hanging fruits in 
female education and water/sanitation solutions, there are potentially 
huge wins in slight reductions of big GCRs. It is not as if the budget 
for desalination is seriously competing with the budget for nuclear 
disarmament.

And if we can make risk management smarter, then we will get more big 
wins. So work on the metalevel might actually be more helpful in lives 
saved per year than rushing into the workshop/lab and working on the 
direct solution.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University