[ExI] Planetary defense

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 8:14 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> Tom Nowell wrote:

snip

>> AGI & nanotech are largely unknowns

snip
>
> And then it might be too late.

snip

Well stated.
>
>> Wars - people are aware, but the level of compassion fatigue is huge.
>> Given  that you can't uninvent modern war (given the tens of millions of
>> AK-47  derivatives in Africa, and that the Lord's Resistance Army wages war
>> by kidnapping children, getting them drunk and giving them machetes), that
>> interventions cost money and the lives of intervening soldiers, and that
>> most of them occur far away from the developed world, it is very hard to get
>> people to care. There are communities working on reducing warfare, but it's
>> a hard task.

Especially when you don't understand the ecological root cause of war.

> 100 years of world cuisine: http://100yearsofworldcuisine.com/ (this
> visualisation made my day today)

Ugh.

> I doubt any xrisk is going to be a simple task. Wars are likely among the
> hardest, since they are motivated by pretty deep seated issues - not just
> human emotions but economics, memetics and coordination issues.

See "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War" for my view
on the order in which these are evoked and why.

I have been talking about the evolutionary origin of wars for a long
time, http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2009-July/052083.html
and there has been virtually no feedback.  I can't decide if it is
just too obvious, or way to deep for this mailing list.

> But they are
> also coordinated activities (that is why they are so dangerous) and that
> means we can perhaps influence their coordination too.

I suspect this isn't going to help.  Evolution has wired in turning up
the gain on a class of memes, xenophobic ones, and I can't see where
one kind of xenophobic meme is going to be any better than another
kind.  Better we keep the mechanism switched off.

> And since wars tend
> to make other GCRs and xrisks worse or possibly trigger them they are a
> crucial part of the anti-xrisk agenda.

Agreed.  Which is why keeping the economic growth above the population
growth is key.  It keeps the psychological mechanisms leading to war
in the "off" state.

> Pinker's observation on the reduction of violence is actually quite
> cheering. We are making things safer in one sense (average violence
> amplitude is going down),

I argue that this is a simple consequence of low population growth
combined with modest economic growth in the places where violence is
down.  Violent talk and then violent behavior will come back rapidly
in declining economic conditions.  I think you can see the early
phases of that in the US.

> although the scale limits (once wars were limited
> by geography) has disappeared.
>
>> Climate change -

snip
>
> It confuses the hell out of the (honest) experts too. Being in touch with
> the climate community around Oxford has made me realize 1) the physical part
> of the science is pretty solid, 2) the data is messy anyway and prediction
> is largely a fool's game, and 3) the all-important dynamics of
> geosystem-human system interaction is not understood well at all.

Clearly stated and accurate.  For example, with nanotech plants that
made diamond or even polyethylene we could have a crisis in a decade
of too little CO2 in the atmosphere.

> So most
> claims about climate and climate policy are based on faulty inputs. The best
> approach is likely to push *hard* on tech development here - we want to get
> off fossil anyway, solar power and other forms of local power production are
> good for resilience, low-energy computing is needed for uploading, and so
> on.

Ground solar currently has an energy payback time of 2-4 years.

Space based looks like under two months.

> Saving the world is no picnic. But it feels pretty rewarding.

Hmm.  I might use other terms.

Keith

> Anders Sandberg,
> Future of Humanity Institute James Martin 21st Century School Philosophy
> Faculty Oxford University
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