The Zero Numerator problem.
I: Don’t Draw a Black Ball from the Urn of Invention
“It is an unnerving thought,” Bill Bryson once wrote, “that we may be living the universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.” Our sensations of awe and beauty, our intense ability to love, our self-aware consciousness may each be unparalleled—a rare instance of the universe perceiving itself.1
But as humans, we also possess an awesome capability known to no other species on the planet: we can make ourselves extinct. No matter how much octopuses scheme or chimpanzees twirl rudimentary tools, they cannot destroy themselves. We are in our own club, trapped in a cage of existential risk—designed by our cleverness, as seemingly inescapable as the march of progress, and with the unfortunate potential to kill us all…
…[F]or those who favor complacency, it’s important to note: just because something has been alright for a long time, doesn’t mean it will continue to be alright forever. Taleb uses the parable of the turkey on a farm, a plump bird who sees the farmer as a lovely man who comes to bring him food, without fail, every day. The farmer is his friend, his provider, his carer—until one day, right before Thanksgiving, ruin comes unexpectedly. We would be wise not to be that turkey.
V: We Don’t Have to Destroy Ourselves
If Bostrom is correct that a black ball is lurking in the urn, then he points to two possible solutions to mitigate our cataclysmic end. The first is a non-starter: create such extensive policing surveillance that “any halfwit” can’t destroy humanity because every halfwit is constantly being monitored to ensure they don’t take advantage of an “easy nukes” scenario.
The more realistic scenario is difficult, but not impossible: true global governance of existential risks. This requires unprecedented cooperation to avoid unprecedented consequences. So far, our track record is not great…
…[As] Filippa Lentzos of King’s College London explained to me previously, there still is no international organization with enforcement power that regulates or inspects all of the most potentially dangerous labs in the world—those known as biosafety level 4, or BSL-4 labs. It’s such an obvious area of potential risk—and we continue to allow a laissez-faire attitude, leaving these decisions mostly to national governments. The same is broadly true of artificial intelligence, where the technology is rapidly outpacing regulation.
But we don’t have to accept reckless courting of existential risk. If we fear a black ball is being withdrawn from the urn, we have the power to stop it. It’s a choice…
The point is not to suggest that existential risks are overblown—they’re clearly not. Whether it’s extreme climate change, nuclear apocalypse, devastation from artificial intelligence, mirror life or other biothreats, we are living in an unprecedented era of a new power—the power to destroy ourselves.
But humans can be astonishingly wise when it counts most; if we demand that our leaders take these threats more seriously; and if our politicians have the courage to create new, powerful international agencies that have the teeth to manage and mitigate the lurking black balls that could end our species, then I’d be far more willing to bet on humanity’s longevity.
Despite our cornucopia of flaws, we are worth saving; a species defined not just by our maddening defects, but by our unique curiosity, wonder, awe, love, beauty, ingenuity, and kindness. And yet, nobody can save us but ourselves…
Yeah, Klaas is once again back in session. The foregoing is excerpted from his Substack newsletter series. Do yourself a favor. Read his books and subscribe to his Stack. See also this post.
This stuff coheres nicely with two books in progress at the moment.
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| From The Demon in the Machine |
Introduction
WICKED PROBLEMS
This book is about the origins of modern communications as seen through the adventures of several men who spent their careers working at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Even more, though, this book is about innovation—about how it happens, why it happens, and who makes it happen. It is likewise about why innovation matters, not just to scientists, engineers, and corporate executives but to all of us. That the story is about Bell Labs, and even more specifically about life at the Labs between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s, isn’t a coincidence. In the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to California’s Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in capacious brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses where deer would graze at twilight. At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs. Its ranks included the world’s most brilliant (and eccentric) men and women. In a time before Google, the Labs sufficed as the country’s intellectual utopia. It was where the future, which is what we now happen to call the present, was conceived and designed.
For a long stretch of the twentieth century, Bell Labs was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. It was arguably among the world’s most important commercial organizations as well, with countless entrepreneurs building their businesses upon the Labs’ foundational inventions, which were often shared for a modest fee. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t Bell Labs’ intended function. Rather, its role was to support the research and development efforts of the country’s then-monopolistic telephone company, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), which was seeking to create and maintain a system—the word “network” wasn’t yet common—that could connect any person on the globe to any other at any time. AT&T’s dream of “universal” connectivity was set down in the early 1900s. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for this idea to mature, thanks largely to the work done at Bell Labs, into a fantastically complex skein of copper cables and microwave links and glass fibers that tied together not only all of the planet’s voices but its images and data, too. In those evolutionary years, the world’s business, as well as its technological progress, began to depend on information and the conduits through which it moved. Indeed, the phrase used to describe the era that the Bell scientists helped create, the age of information, suggested we had left the material world behind. A new commodity—weightless, invisible, fleet as light itself—defined the times.
A new age makes large demands. At Bell Labs, it required the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers over many decades—millions of “man-hours,” in the parlance of AT&T, which made a habit of calculating its employees’ toil to a degree that made its workers proud while also keeping the U.S. government (which closely monitored the company’s business practices and long-distance phone monopoly) at bay. For reasons that are conceptual as well as practical, this book does not focus on those tens of thousands of Bell Laboratories workers. Instead, it looks primarily at the lives of a select and representative few: Mervin Kelly, Jim Fisk, William Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and William Baker. Some of these names are notorious—Shockley, for instance, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and in his later years steadfastly pursued a scientific link between race and intelligence. Others, such as Shannon, are familiar to those within a certain area of interest (in Shannon’s case, mathematics and artificial intelligence) while remaining largely unknown to the general public. Pierce, a nearly forgotten figure, was the father of satellite communications and an instigator of more ideas than can be properly accounted for here. Kelly, Fisk, and Baker were presidents of the Labs, and served as stewards during the institution’s golden age. All these men knew one another, and some were extremely close. With the exception of Mervin Kelly, the eldest of the group, they were sometimes considered members of a band of Bell Labs revolutionaries known as the Young Turks. What bound them was a shared belief in the nearly sacred mission of Bell Laboratories and the importance of technological innovation.
The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.” This description aimed to inform the world that the line between the art and science of what Bell scientists did wasn’t always distinct. Moreover, while many of Kelly’s colleagues might have been eccentrics, few were dreamers in the less flattering sense of the word. They were paid for their imaginative abilities. But they were also paid for working within a culture, and within an institution, where the very point of new ideas was to make them into new things…
Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (pp. 1-3). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
NOTEWORTHY
Hmmm... "Wicked Problems?" Recent book I've read.
UPDATE: CLAUDE SHANNON OF BELL LABS
I don't know that my Dad ever knew him. Pop worked in semiconductor R&D, one of myriad lower level lab technicians.
More shortly...
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