Accelerating Future

Usually, the abrupt extinction of the human species occurs in the context of a joke or fictional plot device, and is more rarely considered in serious terms. That’s why I’m pleased to see two events on extinction risk occurring this year — a day-long seminar on preventing extinction by the IEET, occurring at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, and a Global Catastrophic Risks conference at Oxford. The conference is 17-20 July, the seminar is on the 14th of November. If you plan to attend, I will see you at the Palo Alto seminar.

The jokey way in which most people react to extinction risk is a major obstacle to getting the world to take these possibilities seriously. Risk prevention advocates acknowledge the lacksidasical approach to x-risks in popular culture, in contrast to issues like health care, civil rights, and foreign relations. The latter issues are important, yes — but so is x-risk prevention. Leading scientists like Stephen Hawking have argued that the likelihood of humanity wiping itself out in the next century could be as high as 50%. Even if the figure is as low as 10%, it merits more attention than it gets.

That’s why I’ve come to believe that a controlled demonstration of extremely destructive weapons may ultimately be necessary to convince the world that we need to take extinction risk prevention seriously. This is a very difficult position to come to, considering both the possible PR blowback and the very real dangers inherent in developing and deploying such weapons. But I’ve come to think it may be the only way to really get prevention efforts going, on the same scale as global warming prevention or larger.

Of particular interest are weapons of mass destruction driven by chemical loops, synthetic, natural, or modified organisms, or robotics, which demonstrate an open-ended ability to self-replicate using common hosts, like humans, or materials available in the field, like dirt and sunlight. If a country’s military were able to use such a weapon to destroy all life on, say, a very small quarantined island populated only by plants and insects, then the world’s attitude towards extinction risk would turn around overnight. Poking, prodding, arguing, and intellectualizing can only go so far. At some point, people need to see it with their own eyes.

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The branding of catastrophic risk as a globe on fire makes me snicker a bit.

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Given adequate food, fuel, and gender equality, mass conflict just might disappear.

This was published by Discover magazine two days ago. By John Horgan:

Frans de Waal stands in a watchtower at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center north of Atlanta, talking about war. As three hulking male chimpanzees and a dozen females loll below him, the renowned primatologist rejects the idea that war stems from “some sort of blind aggressive drive.” Observations of lethal fighting among chimpanzees, our close genetic relatives, have persuaded many people that war has deep biological roots. But de Waal says that primates, and especially humans, are “very calculating” and will abandon aggressive strategies that no longer serve their interests. “War is evitable,” de Waal says, “if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits.”

War evitable? That is a minority opinion in these troubled times. For several years I’ve been probing people’s views about war. Almost everyone, regardless of profession, political persuasion, or age, gives me the same answer: War will never end. I asked 205 students at the college where I teach, “Will humans ever stop fighting wars, once and for all?” More than 90 percent said no. This pessimism seems to be on the rise; in the mid-1980s, only one in three students at Wesleyan University agreed that “wars are inevitable because human beings are naturally aggressive.”

Asked to explain their views, most fatalists offer variations on Robert McNamara’s remarks in the documentary The Fog of War. “I’m not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war,” said McNamara, who was the U.S. defense secretary during the Vietnam War. “We’re not going to change human nature any time soon.” War, in other words, is inevitable because it is innate, “in our genes,” as my students like to put it.

Continue.

Even given adequate food, fuel, etc., people might still find reasons to make war, but they’d be far decreased. I’d worry more about massively destructive individuals.

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This is weird and funny. From the New York Times, “Museum Kills Live Exhibit”:

Art is deathless, the poets say. Unless it isn’t.

One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.

Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.

H/t George Dvorsky.

What if the “nutrients” are plant detritus and sunlight, the “expanding coat” is released simultaneously from twenty thousand locations, and it can double its volume as fast as bamboo, except horizontally instead of just vertically? Such a construct could display indefinite isometric growth, like Dickinsonia. Given enough plant material, and assuming a growth rate compared to peak rates for bamboo, the coat could expand about 20 m (65 ft) in all directions per day. So a patch a foot across could grow to a mile across in three months.

With a simple self-redistribution scheme, like flicking bits of itself dozens of feet in a manner similar to springtails, we could improve on this expansion rate greatly, perhaps boosting it to hundreds of feet per day. To protect itself from animals and humans, it could produce a toxin that is general-purpose, easy to synthesize, and extremely deadly. Conventional bombs would be somewhat unhelpful against such an organism after it reaches a certain size, so you’d have to use crop dusters to poison every square inch of it. If anything was left over, it could just keep extending itself, like a starfish that regenerates after getting most of its arms chopped off.

I know some people who would do this just for the excitement of getting away with it and the fun of seeing how the authorities react.

If you dropped something like this onto the abyssal plains of the oceans, how long would it take us to find it? (Of course, on the abyssal plain, there are scarce nutrients, but xenophyophores, for instance, can reach population densities as high as 2,000 individuals per 100 square meters in some locations, enough for them to cover the floor there in a thin layer of slime, so it’s not impossible. And it could take years to detect.)

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Global Catastrophic Risks Conference
July 17-20, Oxford, UK

In July, the Future of Humanity Institute will play host to a number of leading experts on a range of different global catastrophic risks. The conference in Oxford is intended to advance knowledge and increase academic interest in this neglected area and provide a forum to discuss the common problems and methodologies which affect the study of global catastrophic risks.

The term global catastrophic risk refers to the possibility of serious damage to human well-being on a global scale. Using this definition, an immensely diverse collection of events could constitute global catastrophes: potential factors range from volcanic eruptions to pandemic infections, nuclear accidents to worldwide tyrannies, out-of-control scientific experiments to climatic changes, and cosmic hazards to economic collapse.

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Following is the Einstein-Szilárd letter to President Roosevelt about the nuclear bomb:

And response:

I wonder when a prominent scientist will write to our President about the potential benefits and dangers of AI research. Hopefully soon. (Or would that be a bad idea?)

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It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species. Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.

– Stephen Hawking

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