4 ms·

I'm fairly confident the great filter is ahead of us. It won't be long (20-50yrs) until any hacker minded 14yr old can create a virulent virus in their bedroom

I'm fairly confident the great filter is ahead of us. It won't be long (20-50yrs) until any hacker minded 14yr old can create a virulent virus in their bedroom and release it to the world when their girlfriend/boyfriend dumps them or just for the lulz. And that's just one of the many ways coming where any average person can decide to ruin the world. It's already possible today for a single rich person, if they wanted to, to destroy the world. I don't remember exactly how. Something like buy 1k airplanes and have them seed the atmosphere IIRC. Those kind o things get cheaper and cheaper until their in reach of your average joe

taneq 5y ago
The Sum Of All Fears was partly about this. In that case it was atomic weapons being in reach of wealthy individuals, but the same principle applies. The barrier to entry is just getting lower every year. That experiment/art project with E. Coli on a penicillin gradient a few years back was terrifying.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  Any links or more identifying info? Sounds interesting to me too.
wildermuthn 5y ago
You paint a compelling picture here. But if we extend this picture to a galactic timescale and space, then even a minuscule chance of surviving distributed technology would mean a galaxy full of intelligent life. So if we can imagine even a small chance of humanity surviving itself, then we’re no longer dealing with a Great Filter, but a Small (and in the aggregate, Ineffective) Filter. We don’t really have to imagine ourselves, since enough science fiction novels have already been written where humanity nearly extinguishes itself (sometimes multiple times) but then finally gets its act together. There would have to be something more fundamental than technological power being too cheap and widespread for a late Great Filter to get to 100% effectiveness. The only thing I can think of is that every super-intelligence checks out of our universe for some reason — that the ultimate end of technology is always effectively (if not literally) suicide. But this goes against the very nature of technology — to reshape existence to fuel the battle against entropy. Perhaps every Singularity sees that this battle can’t be won, and decides to call it quits? Maybe. But it seems more likely it would fight until heat-death itself. In fact, there’s a great short story about that too. If there’s hope in our imagination, I think it’s likely there’s hope in our reality too.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Or maybe the singularity realizes there's more to existence than indefinite propagation.
mannykannot 5y ago
Given the project that Fermi is most associated with in the public mind, I am a little surprised that he found his paradox puzzling.
wildermuthn 5y ago
To address your scenario concretely, though, technology advances generally – not just giving the power to destroy, but also giving the power to protect and restore. Covid and mRNA vaccines are a good example – globalization surely contributed to the pandemic, but the creation of the vaccine is also a product of globalization. If a single 14-year-old can create a virus, then thousands of 20-to-70-year-olds can create a vaccine even faster. I might be wrong about this, but I think intelligence and benevolence are more strongly correlated than intelligence and malevolence, and that as the world becomes more educated, it is also becoming more intelligent and more benevolent. An evil-genius is a trope because it is an anomaly. For every evil-genius there are thousands if not millions of good-geniuses. Evil tends to look like Hitler and Stalin, not Einstein and Turing. It won't be a 14-year-old that brings the world to its knees. It will be old men (and women, I suppose) spewing hate and lies from their Oval Offices.

taneq 5y ago

The Sum Of All Fears was partly about this. In that case it was atomic weapons being in reach of wealthy individuals, but the same principle applies. The barrier to entry is just getting lower every year. That experiment/art project with E. Coli on a penicillin gradient a few years back was terrifying.

SyzygistSix 5y ago
Any links or more identifying info? Sounds interesting to me too.

wildermuthn 5y ago

You paint a compelling picture here. But if we extend this picture to a galactic timescale and space, then even a minuscule chance of surviving distributed technology would mean a galaxy full of intelligent life. So if we can imagine even a small chance of humanity surviving itself, then we’re no longer dealing with a Great Filter, but a Small (and in the aggregate, Ineffective) Filter. We don’t really have to imagine ourselves, since enough science fiction novels have already been written where humanity nearly extinguishes itself (sometimes multiple times) but then finally gets its act together. There would have to be something more fundamental than technological power being too cheap and widespread for a late Great Filter to get to 100% effectiveness. The only thing I can think of is that every super-intelligence checks out of our universe for some reason — that the ultimate end of technology is always effectively (if not literally) suicide. But this goes against the very nature of technology — to reshape existence to fuel the battle against entropy. Perhaps every Singularity sees that this battle can’t be won, and decides to call it quits? Maybe. But it seems more likely it would fight until heat-death itself. In fact, there’s a great short story about that too. If there’s hope in our imagination, I think it’s likely there’s hope in our reality too.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Or maybe the singularity realizes there's more to existence than indefinite propagation.

mannykannot 5y ago

Given the project that Fermi is most associated with in the public mind, I am a little surprised that he found his paradox puzzling.

wildermuthn 5y ago

To address your scenario concretely, though, technology advances generally – not just giving the power to destroy, but also giving the power to protect and restore. Covid and mRNA vaccines are a good example – globalization surely contributed to the pandemic, but the creation of the vaccine is also a product of globalization. If a single 14-year-old can create a virus, then thousands of 20-to-70-year-olds can create a vaccine even faster. I might be wrong about this, but I think intelligence and benevolence are more strongly correlated than intelligence and malevolence, and that as the world becomes more educated, it is also becoming more intelligent and more benevolent. An evil-genius is a trope because it is an anomaly. For every evil-genius there are thousands if not millions of good-geniuses. Evil tends to look like Hitler and Stalin, not Einstein and Turing. It won't be a 14-year-old that brings the world to its knees. It will be old men (and women, I suppose) spewing hate and lies from their Oval Offices.