[ExI] Planetary defense

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Tue May 17 06:48:44 UTC 2011


On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 3:46 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> 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

Probably.  Association is not causal though.  It would be interesting
to understand this better.

> 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).

I hope so.  But it's not like we of the west have a lot of leverage.

> 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.

True.  I think I know why the cold war never went hot.

Keith

> --
> Anders Sandberg,
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list