[ExI] Total Surveillance may be necessary to save humanity

[Stuart LaForge]

BillK wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Apr 2019 at 07:43, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

>> Mankind has hundreds of millennia of practice destroying things. All
>> the easy ways to kill and destroy have largely been mastered already.
>> I am not going to lose sleep worrying that some budding young genius
>> somewhere is going to figure out a way to uncouple matter from the Higg's
>> field by using only his cell phone, a pocket-knife, and bubblegum.

>
> Nick Bostrom and his staff at University of Oxford’s Future of
> Humanity Institute specialise in thinking about existential threats to
> humanity. He is 'future-thinking' about possible threats and possible
> solutions. (So no need to panic just yet).  :)

I am well aware of who Nick Bostrom is and up until this last piece  
thought his writings were rather unconventional, thought-provoking,  
and extropic.

> Current terrorist / deranged human weapons so far are conventional but
> can still cause much death and destruction. All governments are
> increasing population surveillance in an attempt to detect these
> groups / individuals before they cause harm.
> Bostrom is quite reasonably extrapolating present activities into the future.

He is also giving the governments of the world his validation to keep  
doing more of the same. Encouraging them to institute increasingly  
draconian measures on all of their citizens (or maybe just most) in  
order to control for the potential actions of a very few. The  
governments are perpetrating a great injustice in doing this and  
justice is one of the primary PURPOSES of government in the first place.

> It does seem likely that weapons (of all types) will become more
> powerful and more widely available. Also that surveillance will
> increase.
> Both developments are too attractive to those involved.

Which is why I object to Bostrom further encouraging what is already a  
bad situation. There is more to the solution space of this problem  
than simply doing what the government has wanted to do all along.

Stuart LaForge