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Technology that may cause existential risk or risk of systemic collapse are one category including nuclear weapons, engineered pathogens, global warming, etc.

Technology that may cause existential risk or risk of systemic collapse are one category including nuclear weapons, engineered pathogens, global warming, etc. Robotics disrupting the workforce and devaluing labor are another category continuing the process of mechanization and automation that started with small electrical motors and the electrification of factories. Artificial intelligence is in a third category because it threatens the disruption and impending devaluation of broad categories of intellectual work.

progne 3y ago
You're listing sources of systemic collapse, but perhaps the greater danger is the reverse: Ilya Sutskever's fear that it has "the potential to create infinitely stable dictatorships." We flourish in a middle ground between collapse and stability, and a cheap source of intelligence threatens to shift the ground one way or the other.
- adastra22 3y ago
  > We flourish in a middle ground between collapse and stability Citation needed? If that were true I would expect a long history of alternating societal growth and collapse. That doesn’t seem to be generally true?
  - progne 3y ago
    See Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, for a discussion in depth. It's a property of all life. I think of it as a zone between inanimate and immolated. We need energy flow to live, but too much kills.
  - brutusborn 3y ago
    I guess it’s true if you look far enough back to the Bronze Age collapse or the growth and collapse of various empires.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      I can think of just two examples in western history: Late Bronze Age collapse and the decline of Rome. Current scholarly belief is that both are the result of not well documented (being prehistorical) immigration pressures due to conquest at the fringe of empire, and/or a climate induced famine double-whammy. The idea of “internal societal collapse” has fallen out of favor.
      - BlueTemplar 3y ago
        Has it ? The decline of Rome does seem to be mostly about civil wars : https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/ https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... (Immigration pressures do play a role in the subsequent fall.) I'm also not aware of climate being behind the civil wars (though that doesn't seem impossible), any sources ?
        adastra22 3y ago
        I mean the "civil wars" in the decline of the western Roman Empire were brought on by factions at the frontier of the empire being drawn in by external pressures. Basically the Huns forced the Goths and other north-east European peoples to flee west and south. For about a generation or so there was a refugee crisis not unlike what we see with Syria today. Then things came to ahead and the Visigoths sacked Rome. It's not wrong to say that it was a civil war. Alaric, the king of the Visigoths, was also a roman legion commander. So I guess you could say that as it was a Roman commander that sacked Rome, it was therefore a civil war? But the actual soldiers of the army that took Rome, plundered it, and as a result ended the western empire was an ethnic army composed of people who didn't really see themselves as roman... so "it's complicated" is probably best. But as far as this thread is concerned, the Visigoths would never have been pushed out of their territory and the refugee crisis wouldn't have existed if the Huns hadn't been expanding their empire into Eastern Europe. It wasn't a cycle of Rome getting fat and lazy and asleep at the wheel--it was, like the late Bronze Age, a series of famines in Central Asia that kicked off a bunch of wars, that created a refugee crisis, which the existing political system was ill-equipped to handle.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Robotisation predates electric motors : see Luddites vs automatic looms : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_loom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_loom

progne 3y ago

You're listing sources of systemic collapse, but perhaps the greater danger is the reverse: Ilya Sutskever's fear that it has "the potential to create infinitely stable dictatorships." We flourish in a middle ground between collapse and stability, and a cheap source of intelligence threatens to shift the ground one way or the other.

adastra22 3y ago
> We flourish in a middle ground between collapse and stability Citation needed? If that were true I would expect a long history of alternating societal growth and collapse. That doesn’t seem to be generally true?
- progne 3y ago
  See Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, for a discussion in depth. It's a property of all life. I think of it as a zone between inanimate and immolated. We need energy flow to live, but too much kills.
- brutusborn 3y ago
  I guess it’s true if you look far enough back to the Bronze Age collapse or the growth and collapse of various empires.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    I can think of just two examples in western history: Late Bronze Age collapse and the decline of Rome. Current scholarly belief is that both are the result of not well documented (being prehistorical) immigration pressures due to conquest at the fringe of empire, and/or a climate induced famine double-whammy. The idea of “internal societal collapse” has fallen out of favor.
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      Has it ? The decline of Rome does seem to be mostly about civil wars : https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/ https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... (Immigration pressures do play a role in the subsequent fall.) I'm also not aware of climate being behind the civil wars (though that doesn't seem impossible), any sources ?
      - adastra22 3y ago
        I mean the "civil wars" in the decline of the western Roman Empire were brought on by factions at the frontier of the empire being drawn in by external pressures. Basically the Huns forced the Goths and other north-east European peoples to flee west and south. For about a generation or so there was a refugee crisis not unlike what we see with Syria today. Then things came to ahead and the Visigoths sacked Rome. It's not wrong to say that it was a civil war. Alaric, the king of the Visigoths, was also a roman legion commander. So I guess you could say that as it was a Roman commander that sacked Rome, it was therefore a civil war? But the actual soldiers of the army that took Rome, plundered it, and as a result ended the western empire was an ethnic army composed of people who didn't really see themselves as roman... so "it's complicated" is probably best. But as far as this thread is concerned, the Visigoths would never have been pushed out of their territory and the refugee crisis wouldn't have existed if the Huns hadn't been expanding their empire into Eastern Europe. It wasn't a cycle of Rome getting fat and lazy and asleep at the wheel--it was, like the late Bronze Age, a series of famines in Central Asia that kicked off a bunch of wars, that created a refugee crisis, which the existing political system was ill-equipped to handle.

BlueTemplar 3y ago

Robotisation predates electric motors : see Luddites vs automatic looms : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_loom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_loom