5 ms·

The Scariest, Most Boring Armageddon

52 points by atroyn 11y ago

atroyn 11y ago
I wrote this in response to much of the hoopla around the 'threat' of A.I super-intelligence, and other unlikely disasters. The future of humanity as a species is worth thinking about, but we also ought to be considering the very real possibility of getting stuck in the awful conditions humans endured in the past, alongside more farfetched (and less likely) scenarios. I wish I had some unique idea about how to do that, but I suppose discussion is just as good.
- javajosh 11y ago
  I'm glad you're thinking about the long-term prospects of humanity. Your point is well-made that a technological regression, at this point, would be exceedingly difficult for future humans to reverse. If humans do not spread life beyond earth, then life will not survive long-term. It does feel like we must succeed in this first great technological expansion, or we might never succeed, and fall prey to Fermi's Demon.
  - atroyn 11y ago
    I sort of left two additional open questions: - How long can the current era last? I.e. are we default-alive or default-dead? - Am I not thinking laterally enough about what pre-industrial civilizations could have done?
- nickbauman 11y ago
  Whether this particular scenario is plausible or not, the overarching concept behind it is path dependence. Path dependence implies that humankind may only have one chance to go through certain transformations. For instance, the Internet, begun in 1966, took nearly 30 years to become the behemoth force it is now. No single corporation could have pulled it off because of the timeline alone. Consider however that we've been doing this transformation thing since we began as a species. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
- mattmanser 11y ago
  I think you haven't done even cursory research into A.I super-intelligence before dismissing it. Try reading Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies"[1] and then I think you will change your mind. [1]http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111 http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N...
  - atroyn 11y ago
    I don't dismiss it, I just believe it to be unlikely. I am in the middle of Bostrom's book right now.
- VLM 11y ago
  Consider that disasters scale fractally. You're much more likely to see a failed AI superintelligence destroy the one supplier of critical infrastructure product XYZ, than directly destroying the world. Its fractal self similar on a smaller scale of hubris, bad specification, bad planning, bad back out plans, poor estimation, bad competitive risk taking. The AI super intelligence that destroys our only global manufacturer of XYZ is very likely to be written in Excel in a spreadsheet convincing the execs that selling junk bonds and opening an ambitious new plant is a great idea, fast forward five years and humanity literally has no CPUs, or no flash memory, or no spark plug insulators. Its very unlikely to be black and white mad 1950s movie mad scientist writes bad LISP code that makes a humanoid-ish robot self aware making it crack open the smallpox vials intentionally. Its also worth considering that "we" are pretty good at destruction with existing dumb tools, it seems unlikely we'd need intelligent tools when simpler cheaper dumb tools cause equal chaos. It didn't take an AI to destroy HP, or Bell Labs, for example. Its statistically possible that the first AI super intelligence failure will instantly vaporize the planet in the same sense that its thermodynamically possible for all molecules in a box of air to randomly be found on one side of the box, however unlikely. In a similar way its very likely we'll have AI destroying individuals, companies, industries, markets, countries, long before it destroys the species.
lossolo 11y ago
Please stop underestimating A.I. power of destruction. A.I. is not danger itself, it's people using A.I. are. Like nuclear power, we use it for clear energy and we use it for destruction. Real AGI is 1000x more deadly than nuclear power in wrong hands..
- atroyn 11y ago
  I'm not sure I understand how exactly a human-equivalent AGI would be more dangerous than an actual human.
  - lossolo 11y ago
    We are constrained by organic capabilities of our brains. AGI will not be. It will see things we can't, it will discover things which would take us centuries on our own. It's analytical capabilities will be unmatched for any group of humans. If hitler would have real AGI, there would be only one country in the world now.
    - atroyn 11y ago
      Consider: by definition, the human brain has the equivalent 'intelligence' of a human-equivalent A.I. That means we are able to understand the A.I precisely as well as it can understand itself. If the A.I can self-improve, then we can also improve it. We're still equivalent. Hitler had literally millions of human-equivalent-intelligences - they even had excellent sensor and actuator suites - and it didn't work out so well for him in any case.
      - mediumdeviation 11y ago
        Because a human brain is not field programmable, and improving cognitive ability isn't as simple as plugging in another stick of RAM. The worry about AI is the bootstrap scenario, where an AI gains sufficient intelligence to modify and upgrade itself. Sure, you're right in that humans don't understand enough about our own brains to perform such modifications, but that may simply be down to a lack of knowledge, rather than not having sufficient cognitive ability to comprehend the brain. Additionally the hardware which an AI can run on is generally assumed to be significantly more malleable than our limited gray matter confined within our cranium
ChuckMcM 11y ago
And then again, we could develop a benevolent AI which is able to design a practical fusion reactor solution which gives the human race essentially unlimited power resources to apply toward cleaning up the planet. Why is that so much harder to consider than the bad scenarios? I suppose evolutionarily the optimistic people probably didn't reproduce as often as the pessimistic people did but still.
- atroyn 11y ago
  The problem there is, such a benevolent AI us not a robust technology. If we are thrown back into the pre-industrial era, there's a good chance that the AI would stop functioning. Make no mistake, I'm optimistic about technology in general, I just want to observe that this is a unique moment in history an we should treat it as anything but inevitable that we'll make it.
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    As I read the author's point it was that some set of events would materialize that pull us back into the stone age (the air tight box) which denies the possibility that something we're already doing has already counteracted that. There are no fewer than 6 reasonably well funded fusion research programs which have some possibility of producing massive amounts of easily consumed energy while eliminating large parts of the negative spiral (say carbon emissions), not to mention that with sufficiently inexpensive energy you can pull carbon out of the air and turn it into what every hydro carbon you want. The world has seen doomsday predictions forever, and while there is always the possibility we'll kill ourselves off, one has to recognize that there is also the possibility that we won't. Good and bad things seem to happen in about equal measure when you look at it on a larger time scale. Doomsday thinking is counter productive to getting stuff done anyway as it tends to sap people energy (why invest time in what you're doing if you're all going to die anyway? sorts of reasoning).
  - dclowd9901 11y ago
    It'd be cool if the first version of an AI was an air gapped "forever" computer that ran on nuclear power and very elementary components.
executive 11y ago
except accessing shale is now trivial
- atroyn 11y ago
  Accessing shale is trivial for our civilization, not necessarily for those of even 200 years ago. - You have to know the shale gas is there - You have to be able to extract, capture and refine it - You have to be able to distribute it
  - tapostrophemo 11y ago
    The oil industry is filled with examples of people not "knowing" exactly what they were doing. Choosing to drill in a given location often included the possibility that there was actually no oil/gas to be had...that the well would end up being a "dry hole."
jmaistre 11y ago
If books and blueprints for advanced technology were available, I wonder what is the potential for leapfrogging technologies. So instead of burning coal to power steam factories, we could skip straight to powering electric generators via dams and turbines. Water power fortunately is not going anywhere, and provides a considerable amount of electricity. The big issue is energy for transportation and for growing crops. I wonder what the prospects for things like switchgrass based ethanol are. I see promising news reports, but nothing has come of it yet.
- cstross 11y ago
  Not as easy as you seem to think. Dams = concrete, concrete = a whole lotta cement and other energy inputs; concrete production is one of our big unsung CO2 emission sources right now. Turbines and generators = refined metal, including copper (dynamo windings) and steel (turbine blades) -- again, lots of energy required. Okay, we can back it off a level and go for water wheels in rivers -- a Roman to mediaeval technology -- driving the dynamos; but it's still not going to work without refined metals (energy intensive) and waterproof insulators, which means gutta-percha or rubber or refined organic polymers -- all of which mean long-haul shipping or again, energy-intensive chemical industry. These obstacles aren't insuperable, as long as we don't get knocked back to dark ages/monasteries preserving books and knowledge but no actual lights-on/wheels-turning infrastructure. If we get knocked back that far in a post-carbon-extraction world, it'd be devilishly hard to build back up again.
  - atemerev 11y ago
    No, it is much easier than you'd think. Energy breeds energy. You start with a smaller energy source, use it to extract resources and make parts for the bigger energy generator, rinse, repeat. Wind turbines and small hydroelectric dams are simple. Megaprojects are harder, but it is easy to start small and extend from here. It is easy to make electric energy, and with enough electricity, everything is possible.
    - maxander 11y ago
      Oil drilling is one of the most technologically advanced industries that exist, if not the most, and the existence of such technology is predicated (currently) upon the existence of globally-available cheap energy. Non-oil-based development would likely hit a ceiling where there just isn't enough energy to progress long before you could recreate such an elaborate system.
eximius 11y ago
Really, the best thing for the survival of the species would be population control (down to something like 2 billion) and eugenics of some sort. Unfortunately, both are highly immoral.
- scotty79 11y ago
  Why would that be best? As opposed to for example finally figuring out fusion power and using that power to dig and sustain deep underground farms and dwellings? There's whole lot of space underground that's currently inhabited by at most bacteria.
  - eximius 11y ago
    Yes, let's just shove a few billion poor people underground (because that's what would happen). edit: but seriously, power isn't even close to our only issue. our population just isnt sustainable
    - scotty79 11y ago
      Why is that? With abundant clean power you can have everything under the surface: space, daylight, clean water, air, food, wood. I'm guessing more could be recycled if energy is not a concern. Surface could be the place kept nice where you go for vacation, all other activity could move underground.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
fweespeech 11y ago
Ultimately, and what the OP ignores, is rebuilding society [and resource exploitation to do so in general] like can be done with the rubble of the existing civilization. It will be a long, slow road to recovery but all you really need to be able to do is setup one hydroelectric dam and you have enough energy to rebuild civilization. We could build those with 1800s technology and, frankly, many of the innovations of the 1800s today are possible by just recycling the bones of a large city. So I don't think this doomsday scenario will be as bad as the OP fears. We just may get booted down to the 1700-1800s and take 300 years rebuilding.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- irremediable 11y ago
  Yeah... I'm more inclined towards your view. It's hard to know for certain, but I think people would redevelop things -- after all, they already developed them once, from a significantly weaker position. There's the possibility that I'm succumbing to the anthropic principle (if people hadn't developed these things, I wouldn't be here to remark they had), but IMO that's offset by independent reinventions of several basic technologies by civilisations starting from much less than our "post-apocalypse" civilisation would have.
- Casseres 11y ago
  The problem is, with just one hydroelectric dam, others will want it. Thus others will fight you for it, and in the process, it will be destroyed or the people that know how to maintain it will be killed.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    1800s-era Hydroelectric Dams are buildable with basically nothing but very basic technology and alot of manpower. No one would kill for them in the general case simply because other people could build it. This isn't some SUPERMODERNTECH but a very basic one we've been exploiting for thousands of years, just the ability to convert it to electricity wasn't really possible until the 1800s.
dwaltrip 11y ago
I don't understand this. There is no way we would lose all knowledge in the described situations. So why couldn't existing knowledge be used to re-boot society? Sure it might take 100-200 years, but it would happen
- atroyn 11y ago
  My thesis is that the knowledge on its own wouldn't be enough. To reflect a later commenter, suppose we still knew how to make shale gas. We still need all the infrastructure involved in getting shale gas - which needs other infrastructure, which needs us to have some other easily available resources. All those resources might be gone.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  It took a very long time the first time. Having knowledge, and having the resources to make use of it, are far far apart. To drill for oil, you need drill bits. They require exotic steel. That requires high-temperature furnaces. Which requires 100 other things - ceramics, high-density fuels (not oil!), presses and breaks and grinders etc that in turn require other exotic machines to make and ingredients to find or make. The chain of dominoes can be hundreds long. And there you are, standing in the rubble with a rock and some sticks. And you're hungry. And so is everybody else, and they want your food. I can imagine another thousand years to get anywhere near where we are now. And it'd look completely different - combining photolithography for circuits with steam engines and slavery. All the inventions of history combined in ways that the new reality required.
  - atemerev 11y ago
    It would be hard enough indeed if there wasn't a cheap way to produce at least some electricity to bootstrap the process. And electricity is easy to bootstrap, thanks to hydro and wind turbines.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Sure, if you have wire, and magnets, and cement, and electronic controls, and pipe (for hydro). And the tools and processes to make those things. If we imagine there's some infrastructure remaining, then there'd be a small window of opportunity to rebuild using that, before it decayed. A couple of years maybe.
atemerev 11y ago
An interesting point, but I can't see how it could happen. The industrial revolution was sparkled not by sudden availability of raw resources (they were always there, including coal), but by advances in physics and philosophy (probably the most important person founding the change was Thomas Aquinas, who defined the separation between secular and religious pursuits, and declared that scientific understanding of the world is actually something good in its own right — but it took nearly 500 years for his ideas to finally take off). The coal, on the other hand, was equally available in 1200 as well as in 1760. If there will be no more coal (doubtful — at least 600 years of proven reserves exist), humanity will find the replacement. Energy resources are so cheap that we have to actually restrain ourselves to limit our footprint on the planet (otherwise, nobody would care). Oil is dirty cheap and still actually flows right from the earth in some lucky places. Uranium is so cheap we are happy with ~1% utilisation rate in "classical" nuclear reactors (breeder reactors would allow full utilisation, but they cost more — so why bother if uranium is so darn cheap? With breeders, we have enough uranium for MILLIONS of years with our current energy consumption rates). It is knowledge that must be preserved, but utter destruction of human knowledge is no longer a "boring" apocalypse scenario. It is quite interesting how this can possibly happen, and what can be done to prevent it.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Somebody made the argument that the rise of civilization is the rise of drill bits. Harder, more durable bits meant more metals mined per hour. More metal meant more durable goods like chariots, pots, spear points, wagons. Durable goods meant more efficient commerce. And on up the food chain. Anyway I remember a graph of bit hardness through history vs city size or some such.
  - oliverluk 11y ago
    Guess this argument can also be made the other way round - larger communities > more interaction and knowledge transfer > harder drill bits. I doubt that human progress can be boiled down to a few factors but has to be seen as a chaotic system with each node influencing every other.
- 11y ago
onetimePete 11y ago
So, the idea is to create a society that survives even this scenario. Distributed Library's,that survive Alexandria. Rugged Tech, that can be made even with just sun power and leftovers. Social networks, that allow for continued cooperation even during times of enforced isolation by disease and war. Social networks that enforce social behavior, by the world bearing witness. Tech that evades the control of the temporary mighty, warlords and priest castes, that try to "stabilize" society by freezing it between the holy cycles of overpopulation and civil war. Lots of work. Doable Work.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Lots of work with really no funding. Who are the custodians of humanity? "All of us" would be great but pretty far off current reality.
reasonattlm 11y ago
Almost certainly not the case that coal and oil are prerequisites, though things might have been harder without them, progress wouldn't necessarily have halted. Different approaches would have been taken. Growing fuel crops, for example, rather than building more mines. The important point here is that improvement in wealth and life expectancy in England started well before the industrial revolution. That revolution was enabled by this growth in wealth and longevity, and thus greater investment in technology, not vice versa. https://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html "We claim that the exogenous decline of adult mortality at the end of the seventeenth century can be one of the causes driving both the decline of interest rate and the increase in agricultural production per acre in preindustrial England. Following the intuition of the life-cycle hypothesis, we show that the increase in adult life expectancy must have implied less farmer impatience and it could have caused more investment in nitrogen stock and land fertility, and higher production per acre. We analyse this dynamic interaction using an overlapping generation model and show that the evolution of agricultural production and capital rates of return predicted by the model coincide fairly well with their empirical pattern."
- atroyn 11y ago
  Thanks for this reference. I'm quite interested in what kinds of alternate 'bootstrap' energy sources would have been available.
beefman 11y ago
Mad Max was originally about peak oil collapse. Nuclear holocaust was retconned in circa Thunderdome. The author apparently doesn't know that fissioning the thorium and uranium in an average rock yields 1,000 times the energy needed to melt it.[1] The ground you walk on is literally beaming with energy, and it's incredibly easy to have out. [1] 2000 GJ and 2 GJ per cubic meter, respectively.
- maxander 11y ago
  Define "average rock," and cite a source for this factoid, please? I'd never heard anything of the sort. ...While you're at it, define "incredibly easy." I'd gathered that thorium fission was still a hard problem.
  - beefman 11y ago
    Average crustal abundance 10ppm * 2.6g/cm^3 * 1m^3 = 26g 26g * 8e16 J/t ≈ 2.6t * 1200ΔC * 0.79J/gΔC * 1000 How did you gather that?
- adrianN 11y ago
  Good luck extracting all the Thorium and Uranium from an average rock and refining it sufficiently to fuel a nuclear reactor.
  - beefman 11y ago
    Without understanding anything about it, it's natural to assume it must be difficult. Otherwise, why wouldn't more people be doing it? As noted in the article, coal mostly sat in the ground for thousands of years before 1750, when all of a sudden mining it was the obvious thing to do. Why?
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Another interesting movie dealing with post-apocalyptic resource-constrained humans is Waterworld (1995).
tlogan 11y ago
I can't see how it could happen - and the reason is even more depressing: world war 3. That will cause "the reset" and after few hundred years the civilization will start growing again. Some of the current knowledge will be lost but it will be reinvented again but better.
maxander 11y ago
A large part of the problem is centralization- if oil refineries or manufacturing hubs halfway across the world fail, we're suddenly out of supplies needed to function. The sort of collapse talked about here is scary precisely because it could happen everywhere at once. Likewise, because oil drilling depends on technology sourced from all over the world, you can't have a "local restart"- you'd have to reboot the entire planet all in one go. Historically, the "fall of Rome" wasn't as big a setback in human history as its made out to be- cultural progress shifted over to Persian countries, who kept on doing science and other nice stuff until Europe got itself back together. Meanwhile China ticked along unconcerned about the whole thing. It wouldn't work the same way in today's world, but that's a solvable problem. I've read about wood gas as a possible energy source for a non-global economy- non-ideal stuff in many respects, and requires the survival of a good amount of know-how, but providing a locally-sourced oil alternative in a pinch.
Animats 11y ago
Not with a bang, but with a whimper. It doesn't take some disastrous event for this to happen. It just takes time. The USGS has resource estimates for all major minerals.[1] For each one, there's an estimate of world resources. Check out iron ore.[2] "World resources are estimated to exceed 230 billion tons of iron contained within greater than 800 billion tons of crude ore." That sounds huge, until you see that current mining is 3.2 billion tons a year. There's less than a century of iron left. It's like that for most minerals. There are not millennia of supply left. In most cases, it's a century or two. The original article says "From about 1760 onwards we've improved our situation dramatically." I've been saying something similar for a while, but I usually date the start of the industrial revolution from 1825, when the first steam-powered railroad started carrying goods and passengers commercially. This was the moment when the industrial revolution got out of beta. It was also when humans started making serious dents in mined natural resources. Before steam power, mining was a small-time activity. Nobody could dig much, and nobody could move much. Today, as mentioned above, 3.2 billion tons a year of iron alone are mined. That's all in less than 200 years. It's not going to go on for another 200 years. The highest grade minerals in easily accessible areas were mined out decades ago. Most mining today is already working low-grade ore. Going for even lower grade ore is possible, but that just postpones the end. Minerals are more of a problem than energy. There are many energy sources, some of which are renewable. Minerals can be recycled, but you lose some at each go-round. Asteroid mining might help some day, but not unless we find some far cheaper way of operating in space. Heavy industrial civilization has a finite lifespan. [1] http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals [2] http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mcs-2015-feore.pdf http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mc...

52 points by atroyn 11y ago

I wrote this in response to much of the hoopla around the 'threat' of A.I super-intelligence, and other unlikely disasters. The future of humanity as a species is worth thinking about, but we also ought to be considering the very real possibility of getting stuck in the awful conditions humans endured in the past, alongside more farfetched (and less likely) scenarios. I wish I had some unique idea about how to do that, but I suppose discussion is just as good.

javajosh 11y ago
I'm glad you're thinking about the long-term prospects of humanity. Your point is well-made that a technological regression, at this point, would be exceedingly difficult for future humans to reverse. If humans do not spread life beyond earth, then life will not survive long-term. It does feel like we must succeed in this first great technological expansion, or we might never succeed, and fall prey to Fermi's Demon.
- atroyn 11y ago
  I sort of left two additional open questions: - How long can the current era last? I.e. are we default-alive or default-dead? - Am I not thinking laterally enough about what pre-industrial civilizations could have done?
nickbauman 11y ago
Whether this particular scenario is plausible or not, the overarching concept behind it is path dependence. Path dependence implies that humankind may only have one chance to go through certain transformations. For instance, the Internet, begun in 1966, took nearly 30 years to become the behemoth force it is now. No single corporation could have pulled it off because of the timeline alone. Consider however that we've been doing this transformation thing since we began as a species. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
mattmanser 11y ago
I think you haven't done even cursory research into A.I super-intelligence before dismissing it. Try reading Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies"[1] and then I think you will change your mind. [1]http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111 http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N...
- atroyn 11y ago
  I don't dismiss it, I just believe it to be unlikely. I am in the middle of Bostrom's book right now.
VLM 11y ago
Consider that disasters scale fractally. You're much more likely to see a failed AI superintelligence destroy the one supplier of critical infrastructure product XYZ, than directly destroying the world. Its fractal self similar on a smaller scale of hubris, bad specification, bad planning, bad back out plans, poor estimation, bad competitive risk taking. The AI super intelligence that destroys our only global manufacturer of XYZ is very likely to be written in Excel in a spreadsheet convincing the execs that selling junk bonds and opening an ambitious new plant is a great idea, fast forward five years and humanity literally has no CPUs, or no flash memory, or no spark plug insulators. Its very unlikely to be black and white mad 1950s movie mad scientist writes bad LISP code that makes a humanoid-ish robot self aware making it crack open the smallpox vials intentionally. Its also worth considering that "we" are pretty good at destruction with existing dumb tools, it seems unlikely we'd need intelligent tools when simpler cheaper dumb tools cause equal chaos. It didn't take an AI to destroy HP, or Bell Labs, for example. Its statistically possible that the first AI super intelligence failure will instantly vaporize the planet in the same sense that its thermodynamically possible for all molecules in a box of air to randomly be found on one side of the box, however unlikely. In a similar way its very likely we'll have AI destroying individuals, companies, industries, markets, countries, long before it destroys the species.

lossolo 11y ago

Please stop underestimating A.I. power of destruction. A.I. is not danger itself, it's people using A.I. are. Like nuclear power, we use it for clear energy and we use it for destruction. Real AGI is 1000x more deadly than nuclear power in wrong hands..

atroyn 11y ago
I'm not sure I understand how exactly a human-equivalent AGI would be more dangerous than an actual human.
- lossolo 11y ago
  We are constrained by organic capabilities of our brains. AGI will not be. It will see things we can't, it will discover things which would take us centuries on our own. It's analytical capabilities will be unmatched for any group of humans. If hitler would have real AGI, there would be only one country in the world now.
  - atroyn 11y ago
    Consider: by definition, the human brain has the equivalent 'intelligence' of a human-equivalent A.I. That means we are able to understand the A.I precisely as well as it can understand itself. If the A.I can self-improve, then we can also improve it. We're still equivalent. Hitler had literally millions of human-equivalent-intelligences - they even had excellent sensor and actuator suites - and it didn't work out so well for him in any case.
    - mediumdeviation 11y ago
      Because a human brain is not field programmable, and improving cognitive ability isn't as simple as plugging in another stick of RAM. The worry about AI is the bootstrap scenario, where an AI gains sufficient intelligence to modify and upgrade itself. Sure, you're right in that humans don't understand enough about our own brains to perform such modifications, but that may simply be down to a lack of knowledge, rather than not having sufficient cognitive ability to comprehend the brain. Additionally the hardware which an AI can run on is generally assumed to be significantly more malleable than our limited gray matter confined within our cranium

ChuckMcM 11y ago

And then again, we could develop a benevolent AI which is able to design a practical fusion reactor solution which gives the human race essentially unlimited power resources to apply toward cleaning up the planet. Why is that so much harder to consider than the bad scenarios? I suppose evolutionarily the optimistic people probably didn't reproduce as often as the pessimistic people did but still.

atroyn 11y ago
The problem there is, such a benevolent AI us not a robust technology. If we are thrown back into the pre-industrial era, there's a good chance that the AI would stop functioning. Make no mistake, I'm optimistic about technology in general, I just want to observe that this is a unique moment in history an we should treat it as anything but inevitable that we'll make it.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  As I read the author's point it was that some set of events would materialize that pull us back into the stone age (the air tight box) which denies the possibility that something we're already doing has already counteracted that. There are no fewer than 6 reasonably well funded fusion research programs which have some possibility of producing massive amounts of easily consumed energy while eliminating large parts of the negative spiral (say carbon emissions), not to mention that with sufficiently inexpensive energy you can pull carbon out of the air and turn it into what every hydro carbon you want. The world has seen doomsday predictions forever, and while there is always the possibility we'll kill ourselves off, one has to recognize that there is also the possibility that we won't. Good and bad things seem to happen in about equal measure when you look at it on a larger time scale. Doomsday thinking is counter productive to getting stuff done anyway as it tends to sap people energy (why invest time in what you're doing if you're all going to die anyway? sorts of reasoning).
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  It'd be cool if the first version of an AI was an air gapped "forever" computer that ran on nuclear power and very elementary components.

executive 11y ago

except accessing shale is now trivial

atroyn 11y ago
Accessing shale is trivial for our civilization, not necessarily for those of even 200 years ago. - You have to know the shale gas is there - You have to be able to extract, capture and refine it - You have to be able to distribute it
- tapostrophemo 11y ago
  The oil industry is filled with examples of people not "knowing" exactly what they were doing. Choosing to drill in a given location often included the possibility that there was actually no oil/gas to be had...that the well would end up being a "dry hole."

jmaistre 11y ago

If books and blueprints for advanced technology were available, I wonder what is the potential for leapfrogging technologies. So instead of burning coal to power steam factories, we could skip straight to powering electric generators via dams and turbines. Water power fortunately is not going anywhere, and provides a considerable amount of electricity. The big issue is energy for transportation and for growing crops. I wonder what the prospects for things like switchgrass based ethanol are. I see promising news reports, but nothing has come of it yet.

cstross 11y ago
Not as easy as you seem to think. Dams = concrete, concrete = a whole lotta cement and other energy inputs; concrete production is one of our big unsung CO2 emission sources right now. Turbines and generators = refined metal, including copper (dynamo windings) and steel (turbine blades) -- again, lots of energy required. Okay, we can back it off a level and go for water wheels in rivers -- a Roman to mediaeval technology -- driving the dynamos; but it's still not going to work without refined metals (energy intensive) and waterproof insulators, which means gutta-percha or rubber or refined organic polymers -- all of which mean long-haul shipping or again, energy-intensive chemical industry. These obstacles aren't insuperable, as long as we don't get knocked back to dark ages/monasteries preserving books and knowledge but no actual lights-on/wheels-turning infrastructure. If we get knocked back that far in a post-carbon-extraction world, it'd be devilishly hard to build back up again.
- atemerev 11y ago
  No, it is much easier than you'd think. Energy breeds energy. You start with a smaller energy source, use it to extract resources and make parts for the bigger energy generator, rinse, repeat. Wind turbines and small hydroelectric dams are simple. Megaprojects are harder, but it is easy to start small and extend from here. It is easy to make electric energy, and with enough electricity, everything is possible.
  - maxander 11y ago
    Oil drilling is one of the most technologically advanced industries that exist, if not the most, and the existence of such technology is predicated (currently) upon the existence of globally-available cheap energy. Non-oil-based development would likely hit a ceiling where there just isn't enough energy to progress long before you could recreate such an elaborate system.

eximius 11y ago

Really, the best thing for the survival of the species would be population control (down to something like 2 billion) and eugenics of some sort. Unfortunately, both are highly immoral.

scotty79 11y ago
Why would that be best? As opposed to for example finally figuring out fusion power and using that power to dig and sustain deep underground farms and dwellings? There's whole lot of space underground that's currently inhabited by at most bacteria.
- eximius 11y ago
  Yes, let's just shove a few billion poor people underground (because that's what would happen). edit: but seriously, power isn't even close to our only issue. our population just isnt sustainable
  - scotty79 11y ago
    Why is that? With abundant clean power you can have everything under the surface: space, daylight, clean water, air, food, wood. I'm guessing more could be recycled if energy is not a concern. Surface could be the place kept nice where you go for vacation, all other activity could move underground.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

fweespeech 11y ago

Ultimately, and what the OP ignores, is rebuilding society [and resource exploitation to do so in general] like can be done with the rubble of the existing civilization. It will be a long, slow road to recovery but all you really need to be able to do is setup one hydroelectric dam and you have enough energy to rebuild civilization. We could build those with 1800s technology and, frankly, many of the innovations of the 1800s today are possible by just recycling the bones of a large city. So I don't think this doomsday scenario will be as bad as the OP fears. We just may get booted down to the 1700-1800s and take 300 years rebuilding.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
irremediable 11y ago
Yeah... I'm more inclined towards your view. It's hard to know for certain, but I think people would redevelop things -- after all, they already developed them once, from a significantly weaker position. There's the possibility that I'm succumbing to the anthropic principle (if people hadn't developed these things, I wouldn't be here to remark they had), but IMO that's offset by independent reinventions of several basic technologies by civilisations starting from much less than our "post-apocalypse" civilisation would have.
Casseres 11y ago
The problem is, with just one hydroelectric dam, others will want it. Thus others will fight you for it, and in the process, it will be destroyed or the people that know how to maintain it will be killed.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  1800s-era Hydroelectric Dams are buildable with basically nothing but very basic technology and alot of manpower. No one would kill for them in the general case simply because other people could build it. This isn't some SUPERMODERNTECH but a very basic one we've been exploiting for thousands of years, just the ability to convert it to electricity wasn't really possible until the 1800s.

dwaltrip 11y ago

I don't understand this. There is no way we would lose all knowledge in the described situations. So why couldn't existing knowledge be used to re-boot society? Sure it might take 100-200 years, but it would happen

atroyn 11y ago
My thesis is that the knowledge on its own wouldn't be enough. To reflect a later commenter, suppose we still knew how to make shale gas. We still need all the infrastructure involved in getting shale gas - which needs other infrastructure, which needs us to have some other easily available resources. All those resources might be gone.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
It took a very long time the first time. Having knowledge, and having the resources to make use of it, are far far apart. To drill for oil, you need drill bits. They require exotic steel. That requires high-temperature furnaces. Which requires 100 other things - ceramics, high-density fuels (not oil!), presses and breaks and grinders etc that in turn require other exotic machines to make and ingredients to find or make. The chain of dominoes can be hundreds long. And there you are, standing in the rubble with a rock and some sticks. And you're hungry. And so is everybody else, and they want your food. I can imagine another thousand years to get anywhere near where we are now. And it'd look completely different - combining photolithography for circuits with steam engines and slavery. All the inventions of history combined in ways that the new reality required.
- atemerev 11y ago
  It would be hard enough indeed if there wasn't a cheap way to produce at least some electricity to bootstrap the process. And electricity is easy to bootstrap, thanks to hydro and wind turbines.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Sure, if you have wire, and magnets, and cement, and electronic controls, and pipe (for hydro). And the tools and processes to make those things. If we imagine there's some infrastructure remaining, then there'd be a small window of opportunity to rebuild using that, before it decayed. A couple of years maybe.

atemerev 11y ago

An interesting point, but I can't see how it could happen. The industrial revolution was sparkled not by sudden availability of raw resources (they were always there, including coal), but by advances in physics and philosophy (probably the most important person founding the change was Thomas Aquinas, who defined the separation between secular and religious pursuits, and declared that scientific understanding of the world is actually something good in its own right — but it took nearly 500 years for his ideas to finally take off). The coal, on the other hand, was equally available in 1200 as well as in 1760. If there will be no more coal (doubtful — at least 600 years of proven reserves exist), humanity will find the replacement. Energy resources are so cheap that we have to actually restrain ourselves to limit our footprint on the planet (otherwise, nobody would care). Oil is dirty cheap and still actually flows right from the earth in some lucky places. Uranium is so cheap we are happy with ~1% utilisation rate in "classical" nuclear reactors (breeder reactors would allow full utilisation, but they cost more — so why bother if uranium is so darn cheap? With breeders, we have enough uranium for MILLIONS of years with our current energy consumption rates). It is knowledge that must be preserved, but utter destruction of human knowledge is no longer a "boring" apocalypse scenario. It is quite interesting how this can possibly happen, and what can be done to prevent it.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Somebody made the argument that the rise of civilization is the rise of drill bits. Harder, more durable bits meant more metals mined per hour. More metal meant more durable goods like chariots, pots, spear points, wagons. Durable goods meant more efficient commerce. And on up the food chain. Anyway I remember a graph of bit hardness through history vs city size or some such.
- oliverluk 11y ago
  Guess this argument can also be made the other way round - larger communities > more interaction and knowledge transfer > harder drill bits. I doubt that human progress can be boiled down to a few factors but has to be seen as a chaotic system with each node influencing every other.
11y ago

onetimePete 11y ago

So, the idea is to create a society that survives even this scenario. Distributed Library's,that survive Alexandria. Rugged Tech, that can be made even with just sun power and leftovers. Social networks, that allow for continued cooperation even during times of enforced isolation by disease and war. Social networks that enforce social behavior, by the world bearing witness. Tech that evades the control of the temporary mighty, warlords and priest castes, that try to "stabilize" society by freezing it between the holy cycles of overpopulation and civil war. Lots of work. Doable Work.

seanp2k2 11y ago
Lots of work with really no funding. Who are the custodians of humanity? "All of us" would be great but pretty far off current reality.

reasonattlm 11y ago

Almost certainly not the case that coal and oil are prerequisites, though things might have been harder without them, progress wouldn't necessarily have halted. Different approaches would have been taken. Growing fuel crops, for example, rather than building more mines. The important point here is that improvement in wealth and life expectancy in England started well before the industrial revolution. That revolution was enabled by this growth in wealth and longevity, and thus greater investment in technology, not vice versa. https://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html "We claim that the exogenous decline of adult mortality at the end of the seventeenth century can be one of the causes driving both the decline of interest rate and the increase in agricultural production per acre in preindustrial England. Following the intuition of the life-cycle hypothesis, we show that the increase in adult life expectancy must have implied less farmer impatience and it could have caused more investment in nitrogen stock and land fertility, and higher production per acre. We analyse this dynamic interaction using an overlapping generation model and show that the evolution of agricultural production and capital rates of return predicted by the model coincide fairly well with their empirical pattern."

atroyn 11y ago
Thanks for this reference. I'm quite interested in what kinds of alternate 'bootstrap' energy sources would have been available.

beefman 11y ago

Mad Max was originally about peak oil collapse. Nuclear holocaust was retconned in circa Thunderdome. The author apparently doesn't know that fissioning the thorium and uranium in an average rock yields 1,000 times the energy needed to melt it.[1] The ground you walk on is literally beaming with energy, and it's incredibly easy to have out. [1] 2000 GJ and 2 GJ per cubic meter, respectively.

maxander 11y ago
Define "average rock," and cite a source for this factoid, please? I'd never heard anything of the sort. ...While you're at it, define "incredibly easy." I'd gathered that thorium fission was still a hard problem.
- beefman 11y ago
  Average crustal abundance 10ppm * 2.6g/cm^3 * 1m^3 = 26g 26g * 8e16 J/t ≈ 2.6t * 1200ΔC * 0.79J/gΔC * 1000 How did you gather that?
adrianN 11y ago
Good luck extracting all the Thorium and Uranium from an average rock and refining it sufficiently to fuel a nuclear reactor.
- beefman 11y ago
  Without understanding anything about it, it's natural to assume it must be difficult. Otherwise, why wouldn't more people be doing it? As noted in the article, coal mostly sat in the ground for thousands of years before 1750, when all of a sudden mining it was the obvious thing to do. Why?
seanp2k2 11y ago
Another interesting movie dealing with post-apocalyptic resource-constrained humans is Waterworld (1995).

tlogan 11y ago

I can't see how it could happen - and the reason is even more depressing: world war 3. That will cause "the reset" and after few hundred years the civilization will start growing again. Some of the current knowledge will be lost but it will be reinvented again but better.

maxander 11y ago

A large part of the problem is centralization- if oil refineries or manufacturing hubs halfway across the world fail, we're suddenly out of supplies needed to function. The sort of collapse talked about here is scary precisely because it could happen everywhere at once. Likewise, because oil drilling depends on technology sourced from all over the world, you can't have a "local restart"- you'd have to reboot the entire planet all in one go. Historically, the "fall of Rome" wasn't as big a setback in human history as its made out to be- cultural progress shifted over to Persian countries, who kept on doing science and other nice stuff until Europe got itself back together. Meanwhile China ticked along unconcerned about the whole thing. It wouldn't work the same way in today's world, but that's a solvable problem. I've read about wood gas as a possible energy source for a non-global economy- non-ideal stuff in many respects, and requires the survival of a good amount of know-how, but providing a locally-sourced oil alternative in a pinch.

Animats 11y ago

Not with a bang, but with a whimper. It doesn't take some disastrous event for this to happen. It just takes time. The USGS has resource estimates for all major minerals.[1] For each one, there's an estimate of world resources. Check out iron ore.[2] "World resources are estimated to exceed 230 billion tons of iron contained within greater than 800 billion tons of crude ore." That sounds huge, until you see that current mining is 3.2 billion tons a year. There's less than a century of iron left. It's like that for most minerals. There are not millennia of supply left. In most cases, it's a century or two. The original article says "From about 1760 onwards we've improved our situation dramatically." I've been saying something similar for a while, but I usually date the start of the industrial revolution from 1825, when the first steam-powered railroad started carrying goods and passengers commercially. This was the moment when the industrial revolution got out of beta. It was also when humans started making serious dents in mined natural resources. Before steam power, mining was a small-time activity. Nobody could dig much, and nobody could move much. Today, as mentioned above, 3.2 billion tons a year of iron alone are mined. That's all in less than 200 years. It's not going to go on for another 200 years. The highest grade minerals in easily accessible areas were mined out decades ago. Most mining today is already working low-grade ore. Going for even lower grade ore is possible, but that just postpones the end. Minerals are more of a problem than energy. There are many energy sources, some of which are renewable. Minerals can be recycled, but you lose some at each go-round. Asteroid mining might help some day, but not unless we find some far cheaper way of operating in space. Heavy industrial civilization has a finite lifespan. [1] http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals [2] http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mcs-2015-feore.pdf http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mc...