Why Global Government Is Inevitable Saturday, May 30 2009
nanotechnology 9:03 pm
By Britt Gillette:
This global government will emerge in our generation because current technological trends will soon make it inevitable. The catalyst for this consolidation of global political power will be the development of molecular manufacturing (MM), a revolutionary technology of unprecedented capability and strength. It’s a technology that could arrive as soon as tomorrow and almost certainly will arrive within the next decade.
BS, MM will not arrive tomorrow, and probably not in the next decade (maybe in the next two), but if it does, I believe that global government is indeed probable, whether you like it or not. Go read Nanosystems. Even if MNT is implausible, hijacked ribosomes would still give rise to exponential manufacturing, so even “soft machines” could lead to the ability to build millions of missiles in less than a couple years. The crucial effects are the exponentiality and programmability.
Anon points out that “a multinational organization willing and able to keep the peace” might also occur. However, it would need to be a heck of a lot more potent than the UN. Whether or not it would be a global government might be a matter of definition.
funny, I thought weapons of mass destruction were the only way to gain sovereignty. if everyone has access to them I don’t think a singleton will be able to enforce its will.
A global government is still not inevitable. If “democratic” nation creates it first (quite probable), then it can force all the remaining non-democracies to be democracies.
“a multinational organization willing and able to keep the peace.””
This does not equal a global government.
I think we are concentrating a bit too much on “geograhical” nations. In the future, virtual “nations” may rise and fall like online interest groups. Clinging to a colonial-nation-state model in the face of accelerated change doesn’t seem tenable to me. Neither does the notion of some “Global Government” solution, at least in the UN model.
Always the obsession with monopoly authoritarianism. You guys still haven’t tripped to the fact that we want to develop these technologies in order to get free of this kind of authoritarian horse-shit.
Conflict arises when people who do not like each other are forced to live in close proximity (e.g. share a single planet). The only solution to the problem of conflict is the dispersal of humanity through out the galaxy.
It is no coincidences that the first people to consider nanotechnology were members of L-5 Society.
Kurt, I should hope that a global authority, while global, would have a low intensity of authority. For example, global treaties are quite possible today — there are hundreds of UN treaties, including banning chemical weapons and biological weapons in warfare. Are these “global authority structures” really so bad? I can imagine a global authority that is only as authoritarian or less authoritarian than the current authority we live under — some countries would just cede larger parts of their authority of the global unity org. I am wary of the possibility of global totalitarianism, however, which Bryan Caplan pointed out in his essay of the same name.
True, absolute freedom already exists for many countries, and it’s often a bad thing. For instance, in Pakistan man can rape their wife, and in North Korea people are used as test subjects for biological weapons. In the Russian army, thousands of new recruits commit suicide because of institutional bullying. If “global authority” intervened in these countries with minimal casualties, would that be so horrible? Particularly in North Korea, where you and 3 generations of your relatives can be sent to a prison camp just for listening to South Korean radio. The world is getting more and more interdependent — there will always be a libertarian minority, and I wish them lots of freedom (but not the freedom to produce child pornography, for instance), but the majority is perfectly comfortable living with some rules and state structure as long as it’s reasonable.
Obviously, we need superior technology or methods. Toppling Saddam Hussein caused over a million deaths and a trillion dollars.
Drexler deserves the credit for conceiving MNT. He just happened to be involved in L5 society. L5 society was a cool idea, but it didn’t get anything practical done that I’m aware of. There is an interesting sentence on the page for the L5 society on Wikipedia:
“The consensus by the late 1990s among those who were active in the early years of the L5 Society is that space colonies or even a serious human presence in space is unlikely before the Technological Singularity decades into the future. “
trotting out anecdotes doesn’t make interventionism inherently better than classical international law.
What would be the definitional range of “global government” ?
Is it just enforcement of some common global laws ? or technological restrictions ?
There is one federal government and single political nation like the United States or Canada. However there are different laws at the state levels for many things. Also, there is non-universal effective enforcement of laws.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
16,000-18000 murders in the US, each year 1997-2007. Almost 90,000-100,000 rapes each year.
Vancouver in Canada has 135 gangs fighting over about C$7 billion of drug business in the city.
There is clearly a massive range of effectiveness in enforcing laws and also where there is state sponsored murder and rape.
Stalin, and other communists had a pretty bad track record
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM
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I think that it is becoming more possible and will be more possible in a world with MM/MNT to influence countries and states to improve effectiveness in enforcing common laws and it would also be possible to detect and intervene against MM-WMD in a deniable way against places with inferior MNT.
Also, the bar will be raised for an individual or group to develop weapons to a level of global mayhem maker when there is nanofactory level MM. A few schmucks with millions of UAVs and missiles seems like a big deal now. But on the other side of MM, it would be like the AK-47 nutcase with some pipe bombs now.
If someone develops fullblown diamondoid – nanofactory MNT, the game should be refining the tech, energy sources and space capability to race to kardashev level 2. Transforming the asteroid belt and the moons.
I still feel the need to point out that as individual nations acquire the capacity for nanotech and molecular manufacturing, it becomes entirely possible — perhaps even plausible — that each will develop its own, unique, countermeasures to the exploitation of such systems in much the same way that different organisms develop different immune systems. And that this is not only a possible solution, but a better solution than a monopolistic/monolithic singleton solution.
If history is any guide, every single system of defense that has ever been made by man has also been circumvented by man. Even a seed AGI could be circumvented by the creation of another seed AGI that could bootstrap itself even faster than the first (by “piggybacking” on the first, if nothing else) — and this would leave us all in the same boat of having put all of our eggs in one basket.
Ignoring recursive AGI, a singleton government is quite possibly the least reliable answer to ensuring the security of the human race in the face of molecular manufacturing technologies.
I’ve said this, I think, just about every time this topic has come up — and it seems it’s still news here. :(
I hate Dale Carrico. However I do agree partially with one thing he says. This post is a textbook example of unrealistic superlative hyperbole.
Nanosystems is a 17 year old book by the way. Hardly the most relevant thing when in comes to state of the art nanotechnology.
Don’t take this as too much criticism, because I love your blog.
“The consensus by the late 1990s among those who were active in the early years of the L5 Society is that space colonies or even a serious human presence in space is unlikely before the Technological Singularity decades into the future.“
That’s if you believe in a singularity idea, which I do not.
Michael,
You seem to forget Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. It is the nature of bureaucracy to see that its purpose is to extend its reach and power. You might want to use a global government to restrict people’s ability to make offensive weaponry with MNT (certainly a reasonable restrction). However, others will grab the levers of control and use them to implement other restrictions on the use of MNT that have nothing to do with offensive weaponry. The fact that such additional restrictions on the use of MNT have been advocated by nanotech bloggers makes it clear that such authoritarian “mission creep” is already being promulgated.
Creating a single world bureaucracy is absolutely the worse possible thing you could advocate. I appose the creation of such a thing on general principle.
I think from a computer security analysis view of the problem, having one central government would be like having only one set of security and passwords to the whole system. If a bad group got their Stalin/Hitler or Bin Ladin in to the top or a near the top and then killed or controlled the rest then you automatically are handing over the efficient means to screw everyone.
This is why the UK refuses to join the EU in a full way.
I can see some increase in international agreements on some issues and matters but not general global government.
My view is that regardless of how dangerous MNT *might* turn out to be, this will not, in and of itself, necessarily bring about any kind of global governance. Proof of this is nuclear weaponry, which has constituted an existential threat to humanity for decades and yet has not spawned any kind of top-down global governance regime to control them (as Kim Jong Il has so clearly demonstrated once again).
The point is that nation states jealously guard their sovereignty and are not about to surrender that sovereignty to some sort of world government. Look at the UN, which is better understood as a talking shop than as a governing organization. The only part of the UN which has anything resembling “teeth”, albeit teeth which are on loan from member states, is the Security Council where it is necessary to have consensus of at least the 5 veto wielding permanent members to get anything done. This is because the powerful nations of this world will not create a setup which might at some future time be used against them, which is a motivation I find entirely understandable.
For myself, I see this as a good thing, as I suspect that any world government type structure would be hopelessly illiberal. Take as an example the EU, where a condition of entry is to have a democratic form of government. Consider how much effort has been spent avoiding submitting the Treaty of Lisbon to referendum in the member states and note what happens when the Treaty IS rejected in such a referendum: the EU insists on a “do-over” until they get the “right” answer. Now imagine what would happen in such a governance structure where the not-democratic-or-liberal Chinese government is a big player. I contend that we are much better off with the UN as a talking shop than with the UN as a Government.
What I think might happen instead, if there are particular MNT-enabled weapons technologies that prove sufficiently worrisome, is that you will get an international agreement among the world powers like the nuclear non-proliferation regime. Given the activities of North Korea that I already mentioned, this may not sound promising, but look at it another way. If, in 1945 you had told someone knowledgeable about nuclear weapons that 64 years hence there would be approximately 10 countries with nuclear weapons (depending upon whether or not you count Iran), I suspect that would have sounded like a rather successful containment of the technology to that expert. My reason for asserting this is that any attempt to build a world governance structure will require consensus among the major powers. It is far easier to get the far more limited consensus necessary for a non-proliferation-type agreement than to build a world government and that agreement addresses the worrisome technology directly.
Michael:
I would argue that the arrival of MM/MNT does quite the opposite from Gilette’s argument: it makes global governance almost impossible.
Personally, I think global government of any kind in even the smallest measure is a colossally bad idea for purely philosophical reasons, but also because it just flies in the face of thousands of years of history and human behavior. Nations always pursue their self-interest first, second and last.
Sure, there are thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands of bi- and multi-lateral treaty arrangements, most of which stand as artifacts of the whatever last war (either actual or trade) or current fashion (Kyoto, anyone?) and are generally given the same weight as yesterdays fish wrap when national interest weighs in. National sovereignty trumps treaties time and again. Be it swords or submarines or nukes, nations want what they want and if they can afford it, they get it.
The problem with MNT from a global governance perspective is short of Magical Nanodust Global Surveillance (setting aside the fact that today we’re swamped with intel product we can’t even start to assess without MNGS flooding the system),
The current international nuclear safeguard systems have a low level of intensity — and have consistently failed to stop any nation with the intent and resources to develop nuclear weapons. The IAEA didn’t shut down Libya’s small nuke program: the U.S. did.
The pure multilateral power equations in the world that prevent the U.S. from turning the North Korean nuclear facilities or the Iranian Nantaz plant into a shimmering plain of radioactive glass as a preemptive measure will apply tenfold to easily hidden, easily mobile MNT production facilities.
A nuclear fuel cycle and weapons production system leaves a monstrous industrial paper trail and clear, empirical evidence of its presence, and even then it isn’t easy. Nanodust surveillance systems leading to counter-surveillance systems and so on ad infinitum is a sucker’s argument: people are good at hiding things, and really good at breaking rules set in New York or Geneva or Brussels.
We generally and rightly hesitate to go with the aforementioned “plain of radioactive” glass strategy for punishing bad guys, but let’s just accept that if it’s easy for these systems to be essentially invisible, its hard to muster the political will to attack or stop them.
I guess the smart thing to do is for white-hat nations to share defensive technologies freely, quickly and broadly and let network effects take care of the rest. Lone gunmen, terrorists, bad actors, small “Axis of Dumbass” nations and mini-alliances will hopefully be no match for nations who quickly develop, share and deploy countervailing technology.
But these network effects almost certainly won’t come from a dead-hand global bureaucracy…and almost every historical example says they’ll be crushed by one. (I worked on a classified project once where we did in 120 days what the AF acquisition folks said would take 6-7 years. Necessity is better than bureaucracy.)
You can generally count on a majority of nations favoring a “don’t bury me in grey goo” policy, so why not put the self-interest of sovereign states to work on an ad hoc basis against the bad actors, share and deploy countervailing technology, then let the alliance dissolve until next time? It’s like a search-and-rescue effort for a downed plane: the state police, the Coast Guard, the Air Force, the FAA, the Civil Air Patrol, the local sheriff, and concerned citizens have a problem, form an ad hoc search operation, and do the job. If one has particular strengths, great. But they share tools, information, platforms and a goal. Then they go back to being their own, sovereign selves again.
Sorry, this was long for a first (or any) posting.
Really enjoy the blog.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is a major think tank and provides consulting to the U.S. government for many areas like this. They have already written up a document for setting one up.
http://www.cfr.org/content/thinktank/CFR_Global%20_Governance_%20Program.pdf
I find it interesting that we are talking here about accelerating technology, and trying to find checks and balances to it by using existing, lethargic political tools.
Barring a Singleton answer, I do not personally see how any existing governmental structure can react quickly enough to future tech trends to make any real difference in their use/abuse.
[...] more thoughtful discussion prompted by the global government post, Paul Raven at Futurismic weighs in: I’d go with global government being plausible, but I’m not [...]
The problem with the linked argument is that it doesn’t take into account the elimination of scarcity, which would be one of the likely outcomes of MM. Our entire economic and political system is based on scarcity – what happens when there isn’t any?
Arnie,
I think this whole post-scarcity meme is quite overdone. MM can change what is scarce but will not eliminate scarcity itself. Even with a maximal type of MM where nearly any arrangement of matter that is not unstable can be fabbed, you still have constraints. First off, since MNT operates on the chemical level, you are left with the relative abundances of elements that we have right now. Gold may be easier to mine and refine in a post-MNT world, but it will still be scarce relative to other metals.
Even if MNT were to reduce the costs of fabrication to zero, there would still be the costs of design of the item to be fabricated. To a first order of approximation, what this would do is to reduce the variable costs of producing the item while leaving the fixed costs in place.
Also, the cost reduction in goods would have limited propagation into reduction in the cost of services. The upshot of all of this is that a lot of things which are currently scarce will be less scarce in a world with ubiquitous advanced MM but, as I said at the outset, scarcity itself will not be eliminated.
I would agree with the above comment… plus see my response in the Brian Wang thread.
So many threads, so little time… Thanks for your insights, gentlemen.
@Greg
But then what would be scarce?
Knowledge, and whatever is IP protected, will be scarce. So, we work on abolishing IP and promoting open source.
Some raw materials, like gold, are more scarce than CHON. This is only a theoretical scarcity if, as I think is the case, there is more than enough anyway to fab anything we might ever need without ever wanting for more gold.
Energy is plentiful, and MM should allow us to harness enough of it that it is not all that scarce, but YMMV (no pun intended) since we can probably find use for all of our energy and still want for more.
So, what else is there? I must admit that I haven’t reflected on post-MM scarcity more than that; maybe it warrants an article on its own (since Michael said he agreed).
Cheers for taking the time to discuss this, I feel can uncover any details in post and discus forum