In this essay I argue the following:
Brain emulation requires enormous computing power; enormous computing power requires further progression of Moore’s law; further Moore’s law relies on large-scale production of cheap processors in ever more-advanced chip fabs; cutting-edge chip fabs are both expensive and vulnerable to state actors (but not non-state actors such as terrorists). Therefore: the advent of brain emulation can be delayed by global regulation of chip fabs.
Full essay: http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law
A variety of links are broken- these include the link about suppression of firearms, the Cheyenne mountain link, the 2011 Thailand flood link, and the experience curve effect. It appears that something has messed up all the links that were to Wikipedia.
This piece seems to be proposing a solution to something that isn't obviously the thing to worry about. There are a variety of other threats to long-term human survival that require technological improvement to combat. Three obvious issues are asteroid impacts, large scale disease (due to modern infrastructure allowing the fast spread of otherwise localized diseases), and resource limitations (such as running out of easily accessible fossil fuels). Some of these are not directly connected to chip improvements- the Apollo program happened with mid 1960s level technology, and it is likely that the technological barriers to dealing with an annoying asteroid or comet are not strongly connected to computer tech level. However, others are not so limited- better computers mean better treatment of disease from better drug design and detection. Similarly, more efficient chips mean less use of oil (since less energy cost for the same computation) and less use of rare earth elements (which while not actually rare, are distributed in ways that make them inefficient to obtain except for in specific locations).
In general, the worry here is not existential risk threats by themselves: If an event or series of events puts us back a few centuries, it isn't obvious that we will have the resources to bootstrap us up back to current levels. Easily accessible oil and coal played a major part in allowing the technological and infrastructural improvements of the last two centuries. While we will likely have coal reserves for a long time, and to a lesser extent have oil reserves, none of the remaining reserves are nearly as accessible as those used in the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century.
Finally, it is very hard to suppress one area of technology in a narrow fashion without suppressing others as well. Many other areas require heavy duty computations, and computational power in many areas of biology, astronomy, math and physics are a major limiting factor. Your essay uses the Tokugawa period as an example of a technology being given up. However, there's a fair bit of controversy over how much guns were actually suppressed, and the point has been made that the Edo/Tokugawa period was relatively peaceful. More to the point in this context, almost no scientific or technological research was occurring in Japan of any sort until the Meiji restoration.
I think it is. For to answer the question "What is the minimal action to avert all the near Earth objects for a long time?" - a lot of computing would be needed. And the computed answer might be "Just send a rocket with mass M, at the time T, from the location L, in the direction D, with the speed S - and it will meet enough of those objects and redirect them, to Earth be safe at least for the next 100 years."
If such a trajectory exists at... (read more)