[ExI] Total Surveillance may be necessary to save humanity

[Stuart LaForge]

Dan Ust wrote:

> Wouldn?t a much better approach be to seed humans (or posthumans)  
> around the solar system and beyond? Then there?s no integrated  
> biosphere that might be compromised that would lead to civilization  
> collapse or an extinction event... Also, humans (or posthumans) off  
> Earth might be able to carry out a rescue or reset if Earth has a  
> catastrophe.

Yes. This is a much better plan to safeguard humanity's legacy than  
creating a totalitarian world-government that spies on everybody and  
disappears people who do or say the wrong thing or release too much  
carbon into the atmosphere.

> (Haven?t yet read Bostrom?s paper, so if he covers all this, my apologies.)

No. So convinced is he that a monolithic world government with the  
power to spy on people and peremptorily deprive them of life and  
liberty is the answer to all the world's problems that colonizing  off  
world  doesn't even occur to him.

Here is his paper. The meat of his arguments are based on speculative  
thought experiments premised on counterfactual "what ifs" like "what  
if you could make nukes out of ordinary materials" as the basis for  
suggesting reverting the state of human rights back to the dark ages.  
It's almost as if Stalin commissioned him to write the paper to  
justify the purges. Far from Bostrom's best work in my opinion.

https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

Stuart LaForge