[ExI] How vulnerable is the world?

[BillK]

New article by Nick Bostrom.
Sooner or later a technology capable of wiping out human civilisation
might be invented. How far would we go to stop it?

<https://aeon.co/essays/none-of-our-technologies-has-managed-to-destroy-humanity-yet>

Quote:
One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling
balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent ideas, discoveries and
inventions. Over the course of history, we have extracted many balls.
Most have been beneficial to humanity. The rest have been various
shades of grey: a mix of good and bad, whose net effect is difficult
to estimate.

What we haven’t pulled out yet is a black ball: a technology that
invariably destroys the civilisation that invents it. That’s not
because we’ve been particularly careful or wise when it comes to
innovation. We’ve just been lucky.
---------------

In effect his conclusion is that as tech and weapons become more
powerful, freedom becomes too dangerous to allow.

BillK