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Z_M_Davis comments on Why safety is not safe - Less Wrong
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I hardly think many here would object to love, joy, and laughter being not outlived by the stars themselves: as you say, the critics are not dishonest. As steven points out, any disagreement would seem to stem from differing assessments of the probabilities of stagnation risk and existential risk. If the future is going to be dominated by a hard takeoff Singularity, then it is incredibly important to make sure to get that first AGI exactly, perfectly right at the expense of all else. If the future is to be one of "traditional" space colonization and catostrophic risk from AI, MNT, &c. is negligible, then it's incredibly important to develop techs as quickly as possible. While the future does depend on what "we" decide to do now (bearing in mind that there is no unitary we), this is largely an empirical issue: how does the tech tree actually look? What does it take to colonize the stars? Is hard takeoff possible, and what would that take? &c. I think that these are the sorts of questions we need to be asking and trying to answer, rather then pledging ourselves to the "pro-safety" or "pro-technology" side. Since we all want more-or-less the same thing, it's in all of our best interests to try to reach the most accurate conclusions possible.
Resource depletion is as real and immediate as gravity. You can pick up a pencil and draw a line straight through present trends to a horse-and-cart world (or the smoking, depopulated ruins from a cataclysmic resource war.) The negative singularity, on the other hand, is an entirely hypothetical concept. I do not believe the two are at all comparable.
Would you bet on resource depletion?
That is your present position, not a good argument for it. It could be valuable as a voice of dissent, if many other people shared your position but hesitated to voice it.
My position, for example, is that resource depletion isn't really an issue, it may only lead to some temporary hardship, but not to something catastrophic and civilization-stopping, while negative AGI is a very real show-stopper. Does my statement change your mind? If not, what's the message of your own statement for people who disagree?
Exactly. The surface-accessible minerals are entirely gone, and pre-modern mining will have no access to what remains. Even meaningful landfill harvesting requires substantial energy and may be beyond the reach of people attempting to "pick up the pieces" of totally collapsed civilization.
Even thrown back to a stone age, the second arc of development doesn't need to repeat the first. There are plenty of ways to systematically develop technology by other routes, especially if you don't implement mass production for the planetary civilization in the process, working only on improving technology on small scale, up to a point of overcoming the resource problem.
Technological advance is strongly dependent on "mass production for the planetary civilization", because otherwise most people are busy doing agriculture and don't have time to become PhDs.
That's only because the power of technology wasn't realized until the industry was way under development. Roughly speaking, you can always tax everyone 10%, and have 10% of the population do science.
You're assuming that 90% of the population can spare 10%. If things were to revert to subsistence-level farming that might not be possible.
Do you actually believe that 10% of the population are capable of doing meaningful science? Or that post-collapse authority figures will see value in anything we would recognize as science?
I agree with the opinion presented in this comment.
Of the consequences of resource depletion, catastrophic social collapse seems to require something like famine (which it should be possible to avoid, given a bit of planning), and even then stability may be achieved once some of the population died out. Quality of life might drop significantly, due to inability to make all the stuff with present technology. But meanwhile, you don't need a lot of resources to continue (or renew) R&D, laboratories won't take too much stuff, only efficient services that come with economy of scale. In time, new technologies will appear that allow better and better quality of life on the resources that were inaccessible before. (And of course, at one point, AGI gets developed, leaving these issues irrelevant, at least for the survival of civilization, for either outcome.)
Resources don't become scarce overnight. It happens a little more slowly, the price of the scarce resource rises. People find ways to use it more efficiently; they find or invent substitutes.
Nor would unprecedented levels of resource scarcity be likely to lead to a war between major powers. Our political systems may be imperfect, but the logic of mutually assured destruction would be clear and compelling even to the general public.
When was the last time a government polled the general public before plunging the nation into war?
Now that I think about it, the American public, for instance, has already voted for petrowar: with its dollars, by purchasing SUVs and continuing to expand the familiar suburban madness which fuels the cult of the automobile.
I encourage you to write more serious comments... or find some other place to rant.
I feel that in this argument, the onus is on you to provide evidence that most people are ignoring a serious risk.
I don't have a good way of assigning probabilities either, but I feel obliged to try.
I estimate the probability that scarcity of natural resources leads to a fifty percent decline in real GDP per capita in many wealthy countries in the next fifty years is less than one percent.
Conditional on my being wrong, I would be very confused about the world, but at this point would still assign less than a five percent risk of large scale nuclear war between major powers which are both aware there is a very high risk of mutual destruction.
I don't think I'm looking at the world through rose colored glasses. I think the risk of small scale nuclear conflict, or threats such as the use of a bioengineered virus by terrorists, is much greater.
Not necessarily. When the last petroleum is refined, rest assured that the tanks and warplanes will be the very last vehicles to run out of gas. And bullets will continue to be produced long after it is no longer possible to buy a steel fork.
Your belief that something like present technological advancement could continue after a cataclysmic collapse boggles my mind. The one historical precedent we have - the Dark Ages - teaches the exact opposite lesson. Reversion to barbarism - and a barbarism armed with the remnants of the finest modern weaponry, this time around - is the more likely outcome.
IIRC, Robert Wright argued in his book NonZero that technological development had stagnated when the Roman Empire reached its apex, and that the dark ages actual brought several important innovations. These included better harnesses, better plows, and nailed iron horse shoes, all of which increased agricultural yield. The Dark Ages also saw improvements to water-wheel technology, which led to much wider use if it.
He also makes the case that all the fractured polities led to greater innovations in the social and economic spheres as well.
The key is that some group would set up some form of government. My best guess is that governments which established rule of law, including respect for private property, would become more powerful relative to other governments. Technological progress would begin again.
Also, see what I just wrote to Roko about why resource scarcity is unlikely to be as a great a problem as you think and why wars and famines are unlikely to affect wealthy countries as a result of resource scarcity.
Not necessarily. To be blunt, we've basically exhausted practically all the useful non-renewal natural resources (ores, etc.) that a civilization could access with 1200s-level technology. They'd have to mine our ruins for metals and such - and much of it is going to be locked up in forms that are completely useless.
Of course it's nowhere near the guaranteed -- notice, for example, that I excluded all other catastrophic risks from consideration in that scenario, such as crazy wars for scraps, only looking at the effects of shortage of resources stopping much of the industry, because of dependencies that weren't ensured.