"Democracy requires the same."—Megan Garber
I have a gut, Donald Trump announced in 2018, “and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” The president’s gut would go on to inform him that climate change is partisan propaganda; that COVID-19 might be cured through the injection of bleach; that any election that fails to produce a Trump victory must be rigged. Trump gut-trusted the nation into political crisis. His first term emphasized the fragility of American democracy. A second would threaten the foundation of that democracy: the public’s willingness to accept that reality is a shared resource...
Dr. Reaven's admonition has been indelibly burned in my neurons ever since he first voiced it in class. Then I was blessed to get to apply the principles beginning in January 1986 when I began a 5 1/2 yr tenure in a forensic-level environmental radiation lab in Oak Ridge developing computer systems and riding herd on bench-level statistical quality control measures (pdf). My first "day gig," beginning at age 39 (a late bloomer).
"Facts?" "Evidence?" Again, "define 'evidence'"
Also again, is there a "science" of "anti-science thinking?" Hmmm... see "Denialism." And, define "science," for that matter. Oh, yeah, must not forget about "Disinformation." Here, and here.
"JUST THE FACTS?" WHY SHOULD WE EVEN CARE?
Recently got back to—and finished—this book after my Liz Cheney digression..
apropos of "getting stuff right" (those facts, and the arguments they comprise). Cutting to the chase:
The balance of existential riskDavid gets my latest "Best-Place to Hide a $100 Bill From Donald Trump" award. Another 10-11 hour read. Worth every minute.
What might end the human species altogether? These days, unfortunately, there are plenty of different scenarios to consider. The science of existential risk, which studies extinction-level events, tends to narrow the range down to four major areas of ultimate danger. The first is nuclear weapons, which retain the capacity to wipe us out many times over. Since the end of the Cold War – at least until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the risk of a global nuclear conflagration appeared to have diminished. But there are still more than 10,000 nuclear warheads around the globe, quite a few of whose whereabouts are unknown. Only two have ever been deployed, and none for more than seventy-five years. But it seems almost inevitable that at some point, someone, somewhere, will let loose another one.
The second area of risk is climate change. That continued heating of the planet due to carbon emissions will cause serious long-term harm to the human and the natural worlds is increasingly hard to dispute. However, truly cataclysmic climate change is something else again. That would occur only if runaway effects took place, driven by unanticipated feedback loops within the global ecosystem, such that the rate of warming became far worse than might presently be anticipated – not two or even three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but maybe six, eight or ten. At that point human life, no matter what steps we might take to mitigate the effects of what we had done to the planet, would become impossible. Finding another world on which to live might be the only option. This scenario remains unlikely, but climate science is pretty uncertain around the edges when it comes to worst-case outcomes. No one knows for sure.
Biological disaster is the next great danger. Martin Rees, the cosmologist who helped to launch the existential risk movement, believes this is currently where the biggest threat lies. The growing human capacity to experiment with our genetic make-up, coupled with a continuing appetite to develop new forms of biological weaponry, makes the possibility of what Rees calls ‘bioterror or bio-error’ wiping out a significant part of the human race a real one. The Covid pandemic, which may or may not have been an example of bio-error (depending on whether you believe it started in a wet market or a research lab), was just a taster of what might happen. As our ability to interfere with nature marches on apace, our ability to regulate the consequences struggles to keep up. It’s hard to build a nuclear bomb in your bedroom but tinkering with a biotech sample is a lot easier. Anything could happen.
Finally, there are the killer robots, or more straightforwardly the possibility that artificial general intelligence might render us irrelevant. When intelligent machines become smarter than we are, and especially if they acquire the capacity to decide on their own enhancement and replication, humanity may lose its centrality to the order of the world, at which point we will be as vulnerable as every other natural creature on the planet. We are at present rendering innumerable species extinct by our own indifference to their fate. What’s to say that AI technology won’t do the same to us? Even before then, while we are busily constructing machines with superhuman capabilities, we risk building some that escape our control altogether. These machines would not have to be supremely intelligent to destroy us, just relentless, and pervasive: dead behind the eyes and with no off-switch. As I said at the start of this book, it is perhaps the quintessential twenty-first-century nightmare.
In each case (nuclear, climate, bio, AI), what we are facing is the coming together of relatively unchanging human nature – we remain a curious, creative, easily distracted, ultimately vulnerable species – with the rapidly accelerating possibilities of technological havoc. To anyone who remains confident that history is still pointing in the right direction – including all the rational optimists who insist that life is getting better and humans more responsible – the pessimists point out that what have changed are the potential consequences of our residual carelessness. For almost all of human history our mistakes couldn’t prove wholly fatal to us. We might do the most terrible things, but our destructive power was constrained by the limits on our technical capacity. Now, those limits are falling away. In that sense, it doesn’t matter if things are improving, or even if we are. So long as we are not infallible, one slip-up could cost us everything. An extinction-level event only has to happen once. And we are certainly not infallible – we are still human.
There is, however, another way to look at this. A lot of the rhetoric around existential risk emphasises the randomness of the dangers we face in an increasingly networked, interconnected, accessible world. The slip-up could come from anywhere – the lone terrorist, the mad scientist, the corrosive malware, the mutant virus. Science-fiction dystopias – from Planet of the Apes to Twelve Monkeys – home in on the possibility of these calamitous mishaps, in large part because they are much easier to narrate … Yet in truth, the bigger risk by far seems to be neither rogue individuals, nor rogue technology, nor rogue monkeys – it is artificial persons gone wrong.
Of the four areas of danger, three are largely in the hands of states and corporations. A terrorist could detonate a nuclear warhead – it is perhaps still more likely that the nuclear taboo will be broken by a lone actor than by a state – but a species-ending conflagration could occur only if states joined in. Runaway climate change is not something that any rogue individual could engineer – if it happens, it would be because the biggest polluters on the planet were unable to restrain themselves. These are all corporate agents of one form or another – just a hundred companies are responsible for 71 per cent of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The worst of bioterror or bio-error is likely to originate with the state funding of scientific research, even if it might end with something inadvertently escaping from a government lab. Species-ending experiments are what artificial persons contemplate; after all, it is not their species...
Runciman, David. The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs (pp. 254-257). Liveright. Kindle Edition.
Once more: Take it From The Top.
INTRODUCTIONA ton to ponder in this eloquent book. Below, great companion video interview, UnHerd's Flo Read with Nick Bostrom.
STATES, CORPORATIONS, ROBOTS
Imagine a world of superhuman machines, built in our image and designed to make our lives go better. Imagine that these machines turn out to be vastly more powerful than we are. It’s not only that we can’t do what they do; we can’t really understand how they do it either. Still, we come to rely on them. They are there to serve our interests, offering us convenience, efficiency, flexibility, security and lots of spare time. Imagine that it all works. As a result of our inventions, we become longer lived, richer, better educated, healthier, and perhaps happier too (though that remains up for debate). We enjoy lives that would be unrecognisable to people born just a couple of generations earlier. The human condition is transformed.
Yet we know – surely, we know? – that there are enormous risks in becoming so dependent on these artificial versions of ourselves. They are superhuman but they are also fundamentally inhuman. They lack the essence of what makes us who we are. Call it a conscience. Call it a heart. Call it a soul. The potential power of these machines in the service of conscienceless, heartless, soulless human beings, of whom there are still plenty, is frightening. But more frightening still is the possibility that these machines will start taking decisions for themselves. They are meant to serve us, but they also have the capacity to destroy us. What if their power were to be turned against their creators? We might have ended up building the agents of our own obsolescence.
This is a very twenty-first-century story, and perhaps the quintessential twenty-first-century nightmare. On the cusp of the AI revolution, we are now constructing machines capable of doing things that leave us exhilarated, baffled or terrified... Runciman (pp. 1-2)
UPDATE
A final David Runciman Handover cite:
Changing demographics will also mean increasing demand for lifelong educational services. The traditional view of education as a preparation for the world of work makes little sense any more. ‘Birth, school, work, death’ was never much of a life prospectus, but now, with the gap between the first and the last growing all the time, the relationship between the second and the third is getting more tenuous. It is far from clear that the modern mantra has the order the right way round. Why try to cram in the education before people start working? Why not educate them along the way, as they adapt to the shifting demands of an ever-changing workplace? And if education is no longer simply a preparation for something that ceases with old age, why stop educating them at all…
Traditional societies rest on an implicit contract between the human generations: the old teach the young and the young care for the old. In modern societies that exchange has grown increasingly strained, as more and more of teaching and care has been delegated to the state. Under modern employment conditions, however, there is still an implicit contract: working-age adults undertake the labour to generate the economic activity that allows the state to pay for the education of the young and the care of the old. But once work is collapsed into education and care, that arrangement no longer makes sense. The young could well be the ones teaching the old; the old could well be the ones working instead of the young. As a result, we may become less reliant on the state to manage the transfers between the generations. But we might have to become more reliant on the state to manage the machinery that makes all this possible in the first place…
This vision of the future does, however, envisage both states and corporations moving decisively away from their more recent strategy, which has been to franchise out economic activity to cheaper human labour around the world instead. That is where we had been heading for the past generation until a series of events, from the vote for Brexit and the election of Trump to the advent of Covid and the war in Ukraine, helped stop the inexorable march of globalisation in its tracks, though some of the pause had been happening anyway… Runciman, (pp. 243-245)
Yeah. I find that quite intriguing. I am now almost 78, and joke about being "a life-long unlearner," notwithstanding being retired and physically "ailing" (the sucky Parkinson's). I continue to consume 2-3 books a week plus my numerous periodicals (and inveterate online info-surfing). I continue to post here just on the off-chance I might contribute some stuff of cognitive and moral utility. Never been about money or "branding." Myriad others have that covered. I've done relatively well across my life. Grateful for nearly everything.
Miss my girls. There are no words in that regard.
So, here I am. Grandpa ("Pop"), Great-Grandpa ("GGD"), washed-up old guitar player, now full Associate Member in the OCC ("Old Coots Club").
We continue to have much to yet tend to.
Facts.
Question: do enough of us still care about preserving U.S. democracy? There is worrisome credible evidence that a committed relatively small minority could extinguish democracy—rather quickly.
We now have 326 days until the 2024 national elections.
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