Extinction is the rule. Survival is
the exception.
(Carl Sagan)
Worth reading. Supertelligence by
Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more
dangerous than nukes.
(Tweet by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla)
The ultimate risk
The Atlantic several months ago
published an interview with Nick Bostrom, the director of Oxford's
Future of Humanity Institution. Bostrom's contention is that human
extinction risks are not well understood. (You can click onto the
complete article We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction
below.)
While Bostrom talks about present
threats to humanity, he is clearly more concerned with longer-term
potential existential threats, which he thinks is where our focus
ought to be. Among those at the top of his list would be artificial
intelligence, while in the nearer term it could be what we might do
in the areas of biotechnology and synthetic biology.
As well, it's Bostrom's contention
that one of the very worst things humanity could do is to slow down
or halt technological evolution because that in and of itself would
“constitute an existential risk.”
In short, according to Bostrom, our
“avoidable” misery will only get much worse if we can't improve
the quality of life, and for him technology is the key, or at least,
a central priority we can't afford to reduce. Bostrom, however, goes
on to say that it would be difficult to slow down technology very
much, let alone bring it to a halt because of the constituencies
pushing scientific and technological priorities, along with economic
interests and assorted individual and institutional priorities. Well
possibly, yet....
Considering the finite then and now
In Thomas Cahill's wonderful book How
the Irish Saved Civilization, he recounts a winter day in 406 A.D.
Roman soldiers stood on one side of the frozen river Rhine, while on
the other side were the barbari, thousands upon thousands of hungry
and determined barbarians from assorted Germanic tribes determined to
cross over to where the Roman legions now stood, the defenders of the
“civilized” world.
Let it be said that virtually no one
on the side of the Rhine where Roman soldiers now guarded the culture
and the glory of antiquity and possessed the most advanced technology
in the world—even at this late date—would you find people able to
imagine that the Eternal City of Rome and its legacy would crumble
and vanish. It would have been incomprehensible.
The late Kenneth Clark in his book
Civilization asks the question, why did the Greek and Roman
civilization collapse. His answer is that it was exhausted. Antiquity
had run out of steam. It had become a static world as Cahill points
out.
Doing the expected had become the
highest value. Fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague—fear
of everything was the norm. Why bother to do anything? Late antiquity
had become a world of empty rituals, obscure religions and the
wholesale disappearance of self-confidence.
The barbarians? The disappearance of
self-confidence? The Islamic State currently ravaging parts of Iraq
and Syria, a determined collection of murderers and psychopaths, with
their longing for the Middle Ages, would have been a familiar sight
to the citizens of the Roman Empire by the second decade of the fifth
century.
The latest discoveries regarding our
cousins the Neandertals, no longer thought to be ignorant brutes,
suggest that the interactions between them and humans may have lasted
considerably longer than we once thought. There is also speculation
now that the Neandertals may have gone extinct because, unlike Homo
sapiens, they were unable to adapt quickly enough to climate change.
But of course we can't draw exact comparisons and we don't know what
the future will be.
Will technology be our salvation as
some believe or is there something else required? Will the elephant and the rhino survive the slaughter caused by China?
Will humankind somehow stop doing the expected and rediscover a new
self-confidence?
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