Can we destroy the world in this century?

Sunday, February 24, 2013 Francisco Carneiro 0 Comments

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We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction

What technology, or potential technology, worries you the most?

Bostrom: Well, I can mention a few. In the nearer term I think various developments in biotechnology and synthetic biology are quite disconcerting. We are gaining the ability to create designer pathogens and there are these blueprints of various disease organisms that are in the public domain---you can download the gene sequence for smallpox or the 1918 flu virus from the Internet. So far the ordinary person will only have a digital representation of it on their computer screen, but we're also developing better and better DNA synthesis machines, which are machines that can take one of these digital blueprints as an input, and then print out the actual RNA string or DNA string. Soon they will become powerful enough that they can actually print out these kinds of viruses. So already there you have a kind of predictable risk, and then once you can start modifying these organisms in certain kinds of ways, there is a whole additional frontier of danger that you can foresee.

In the longer run, I think artificial intelligence---once it gains human and then superhuman capabilities---will present us with a major risk area. There are also different kinds of population control that worry me, things like surveillance and psychological manipulation pharmaceuticals.

In one of your papers on this topic you note that experts have estimated our total existential risk for this century to be somewhere around 10-20%. I know I can't be alone in thinking that is high. What's driving that?

Bostrom: I think what's driving it is the sense that humans are developing these very potent capabilities---we are doing unprecedented things, and there is a risk that something could go wrong. Even with nuclear weapons, if you rewind the tape you notice that it turned out that in order to make a nuclear weapon you had to have these very rare raw materials like highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which are very difficult to get. But suppose it had turned out that there was some technological technique that allowed you to make a nuclear weapon by baking sand in a microwave oven or something like that. If it had turned out that way then where would we be now? Presumably once that discovery had been made civilization would have been doomed.

Each time we make one of these new discoveries we are putting our hand into a big urn of balls and pulling up a new ball---so far we've pulled up white balls and grey balls, but maybe next time we will pull out a black ball, a discovery that spells disaster. At the moment we have no good way of putting the ball back into the urn if we don't like it. Once a discovery has been published there is no way of un-publishing it.

Even with nuclear weapons there were close calls. According to some people we came quite close to all out nuclear war and that was only in the first few decades of having discovered the new technology, and again it's a technology that only a few large states had, and that requires a lot of resources to control---individuals can't really have a nuclear arsenal.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/

Very long and disturbing interview, it's more probable the we destroy our world ourselves than a natural disaster. We experienced natural disasters for thousands of years and we are here. We only lived 50 years with nuclear power and almost got destroyed. Biotechnology (Designed new diseases and Artificial intelligence can kill us fast)!