From Yergin's The Quest:
As Carroll saw it from his vantage point, there were three priorities for the restoration of the Iraqi oil industry—and the rest of the economy—“security, security, and security.” But none of the three was being met. The collapse of the organized state and the inadequacy of the allied forces left large parts of the country very lightly guarded, and the forces that were there were overstretched. And what crippled everything else was the disorder that was the consequence of two decisions haphazardly made by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the entity set up to run the American-led occupation.
The first was “Order #1—De-Baathification of Iraqi Society.” Some two million people had belonged to Saddam’s Baath Party. Some were slavish and brutal followers of Saddam; some were true believers. Many others were compelled to join the Baath Party to get along in their jobs and rise up in the omnipresent bureaucracies and other government institutions that dominated the economy, and to ensure that their children had educational opportunities in a country that had been ruled by the Baathists for decades...
Initially, de-Baathification was meant only to lop off the top of the hierarchy, which needed to be done immediately. But as rewritten and imposed, it reached far down into the country’s institutions and economy, where support for the regime was less ideological and more pragmatic. The country was, as one Iraqi general put it, “a nation of civil servants.” Many schoolteachers were turned out of their jobs and left with no income. The way the purge was applied removed much of the operational capability from government ministries, dismantled the central government, and promoted disorganization. It also eliminated a wide swath of expertise from the oil industry. Broadly, it set the stage for a radicalization of Iraqis—especially Sunnis, stripped of their livelihood, pensions, access to medical care, and so forth—and helped to create conditions for the emergence of Al Qaeda in Iraq. In the oil industry, the result of its almost blanket imposition was to further undermine operations.
...The problem of inadequate troop levels was compounded by Order #2 by the Coalition Provisional Authority—“Dissolution of Entities”—which dismissed the Iraqi Army. Sending or allowing more than 400,000 soldiers, including the largely Sunni officer corps, to go home, with no jobs, no paychecks, no income to support their families, no dignity—but with weapons and growing animus to the American and British forces—was an invitation to disaster. The decision seems to have been made almost off-hand, somewhere between Washington and Baghdad, with little consideration or review. It reversed a decision made ten weeks earlier to use the Iraqi Army to help maintain order. In bluntly criticizing the policy to Bremer, one of the senior U.S. officers used an expletive. Rather than responding to the substance of the objection, Bremer said that he would not tolerate such language in his office and ordered the officer to leave the room.
More (#7) from The Quest:
A few years later, Henry Ford’s grandson, Henry Ford II, acknowledged that “the law requiring greater fuel efficiency in motor vehicle usage has moved us faster toward conservation goals than competitive, free-market forces would have done.” Still he pleaded for Washington to “give up” on pushing for tighter post-1985 fuel-efficiency standards.
One open question in AI risk strategy is: Can we trust the world's elite decision-makers (hereafter "elites") to navigate the creation of human-level AI (and beyond) just fine, without the kinds of special efforts that e.g. Bostrom and Yudkowsky think are needed?
Some reasons for concern include:
But if you were trying to argue for hope, you might argue along these lines (presented for the sake of argument; I don't actually endorse this argument):
The basic structure of this 'argument for hope' is due to Carl Shulman, though he doesn't necessarily endorse the details. (Also, it's just a rough argument, and as stated is not deductively valid.)
Personally, I am not very comforted by this argument because:
Obviously, there's a lot more for me to spell out here, and some of it may be unclear. The reason I'm posting these thoughts in such a rough state is so that MIRI can get some help on our research into this question.
In particular, I'd like to know: