[ExI] Planetary defense

[Anders Sandberg]

Keith Henson wrote:
> True.  Even with war.  If we understand that to stay out of war mode
> we need to keep the population growth below the economic growth, how
> does that possibly translate into anything we can do reduce the birth
> rate in (say) Arab cultures?
>   

Female education. Decreases the birth rate and increases the economic 
growth rate, among other things. Figuring out how to spread it well in a 
certain culture is of course a particular problem, requiring 
understanding, ingenuity and resources. In addition, many of the Arab 
countries are suffering from extremely bad governance for a bundle of 
reasons; this produces a self-reinforcing loop of violence/repression, 
low trust, low economic growth and corruption. Breaking that one would 
also have big positive effects in the long run (but transitions are 
rarely easy - I suspect we are going to see a long sequence of further 
uprisings in the Arabian spring countries even if they eventually do fine).

The nice thing with much of physics and engineering is that you can do 
scale separation or keep things modular. In human affairs things go on 
at all levels and interact in messy ways: there is little modularity. In 
a way "rule of law, not of men" is an attempt to improve modularity by 
separating the legal functions from the personal interests of the people 
implementing them. Maybe finding other ways of modularizing society 
might be helpful - although this often means that social and emotional 
matters become impersonal, which people often do not like.

Defending the planet from large-scale wars might be less of a human 
problem than a problem of how to get metaorganisms to cooperate or at 
least coordinate. The cold war was not so much about people in conflict 
as systems of people in conflict. And such systems can behave in ways 
fairly decoupled from the interests and ways of thinking of their 
components.

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