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MirRSS Popular Science, USA © public domain, United States Department of EpegduPyat the most serious threats to human existence Popular Sciencescale and disastrous crises that can destroy humanity 03.06.20140364
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Anders Sandberg
Carried away by the hype about the modern "crises" that humanity is facing, we forget about the large number of generations that we hope will come to replace us.
We are not talking about those people who will live 200 years after us, but about those who will live a thousand or 10 thousand years after us.
I use the word "hope" because we are facing risks that are called existential and that can destroy humanity.
These risks are associated not just with major disasters, but with such disasters that can put an end to history.
However, not everyone ignores the distant future.
Mystics like Nostradamus regularly try to determine the date of the end of the world.
H. G. Wells tried to develop the science of predictions and, as is known, described the future of mankind in the book "The Time Machine".
Other writers came up with other options for the distant future in order to warn, entertain or fantasize.
But even if all these pioneers and futurologists did not think about the future of humanity, the result would still remain the same.
There was not much that a person could have done before to save us from an existential crisis, or even to cause it.
Today we are in a more privileged position.
Human activity is gradually shaping the future of our planet.
And although we are still far from being able to control disasters, we are already developing technologies that can mitigate their consequences, or at least do something in this regard.
The future is imperfect
However, these risks are still insufficiently studied.
There is impotence and fatalism regarding the listed problems.
People have been talking about apocalypses for thousands of years, but few people have tried to prevent them.
Human beings, moreover, are not so strong when it comes to problems that have not yet appeared (especially due to the impact of the availability heuristic — the tendency to overestimate the probability of events whose examples are familiar to us, and to underestimate those events that we can not immediately remember).
If humanity ceases to exist, then this kind of loss will be, at least, the equivalent of the loss of all living individuals, as well as the collapse of all their goals.
However, in reality, such a loss is likely to be much greater.
The disappearance of a person means the loss of the meaning created by previous generations, the loss of the life of all future generations (and the number of future lives can be astronomical), as well as all those values that they probably could have created.
If consciousness and reason are no longer there, then this probably means that value itself ceases to exist in the universe.
This is a very serious moral reason for working tirelessly to prevent existential threats.
And we should not make a single mistake on this path.
With that said, I have chosen the five most serious threats to human existence.
However, some additional circumstances should be taken into account, since this list is not yet final.
Over the past few centuries, we have discovered or created new existential risks for ourselves: in the early 1970s, supervolcans were discovered, and before the Manhattan project, nuclear war was impossible.
Therefore, we should expect other threats to appear.
In addition, some risks that seem serious today may disappear as knowledge accumulates.
The probability of certain events also changes over time.
Sometimes this happens because we are concerned about existing risks and eliminate their causes.
And finally, the fact that something is possible and potentially risky does not mean that it is worth worrying about it.
There are risks that we canot do anything about at all — for example, gamma ray fluxes that occur during the explosion of galaxies.
But if we find out that we are able to do something, then the priorities change.
For example, with the improvement of sanitary conditions, the advent of vaccines and antibiotics, the plague began to be perceived not as a manifestation of divine punishment, but as a result of a poor state of health care.
1. Nuclear war
Although only two atomic bombs have been used so far — in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — and the stocks of nuclear charges have decreased in comparison with the peak indicators of the Cold War period, it would be a mistake to assume that a nuclear war is impossible.
In fact, it does not seem to be improbable.
The Cuban missile crisis was very close to turning into a nuclear one.
If we assume that such a crisis occurs every 69 years and there is one chance in three that it can lead to the outbreak of a nuclear war, then the possibility of such a catastrophe increases and the corresponding coefficient will be 1 to 200 per year.
Even worse, the Cuban missile crisis is only the most well known case.
The history of Soviet American nuclear deterrence is replete with crisis situations and dangerous mistakes.
The actual probability no longer depends on international tension, however, it is unlikely that the probability of a nuclear conflict will be lower than the coefficient of 1 to 1000 per year.
A full scale nuclear war between the major powers would lead to the death of hundreds of millions of people directly at the moment of the exchange of blows or as a result of their consequences — it would be an unthinkable catastrophe.
However, this is still not enough for existential risk.
The same should be said about the risks associated with the consequences of nuclear explosions — they are often exaggerated.
At the local level, they are deadly, but on a global scale, this is a relatively limited problem.
Cobalt bombs have been proposed as a hypothetical doomsday weapon capable of destroying everything as a result of the consequences associated with their use, but in practice they are very difficult to manufacture and expensive.
And their creation, in fact, is impossible.
The real threat is a nuclear winter — that is, soot particles that can rise into the stratosphere and thereby cause a long term decrease in temperature and dehydration of the planet.
Modern climate simulations show that in such a case it will be impossible to engage in agriculture on most of the planet for many years.
If such a scenario is implemented, billions of people will die of hunger, and a small number of survivors will be exposed to other threats, including diseases.
The main uncertainty is how the soot particles that have risen into the sky will behave: depending on their composition, the result may be different, and so far we do not have a reliable way to measure this kind of consequences.
2. Pandemics caused by bioengineering
Natural pandemics have caused more deaths than wars.
However, natural pandemics are unlikely to pose an existential threat.
Usually there are people who are immune to pathogens, and the descendants of survivors become even more protected.
Evolution is also not particularly favorable to those parasites that destroy host organisms, which is why syphilis, as it spread in Europe, turned from an evil killer and a chronic disease.
Unfortunately, at the present time, we ourselves are able to make diseases more destructive.
One of the most famous examples is how the inclusion of an additional gene in mouse pox — a mouse variant of smallpox made it much more life threatening and capable of infecting already vaccinated individuals.
Recent work with avian influenza has shown that the contagiousness of the disease can be purposefully increased.
Currently, the risk that someone will intentionally spread some kind of malicious infection is insignificant.
However, as biotechnologies improve and become cheaper, an increasing number of groups will be able to make the disease even more dangerous.
Most of the work in the field of biological weapons is carried out by States that want to get something controlled, since the destruction of humanity is not militarily useful.
However, there will always be people who come to do some things simply because they are able to do it.
Others may have higher goals.
For example, members of the religious group Aum Shinrikyo tried to accelerate the onset of the apocalypse through the use of biological weapons, and not only with the help of their more successful attack with the use of nerve gas.
Some people believe that the situation on Earth will improve if there are no more human beings on it, and so on.
The number of deaths as a result of the use of biological weapons and epidemic diseases makes one think that they develop according to a power law — in a large number of cases there are few victims, but in a small number of cases there are many victims.
Taking into account the currently available data, the risk of a global pandemic as a result of bioterrorism seems to be small.
But this applies only to bioterrorism: governments with the help of biological weapons killed significantly more people than bioterrorists (about 400 thousand people were victims of the Japanese biological warfare program during World War II).
Technologies are becoming more effective, and therefore the creation of even more pathogenic microorganisms in the future will be easier.
3. Superintelligence
Intelligence has great power.
A slight increase in the ability to solve problems and coordinate behavior in a group is the reason why the rest of the monkey species were out of business.
Currently, their existence depends on the decisions made by a person, and not on what they do.
Being smart is a real superiority for people and organizations, and therefore a lot of effort is directed to improving our individual and collective intelligence: from drugs to improve cognitive abilities to the development of programs related to artificial intelligence.
The problem is that intelligent systems demonstrate good results in achieving their goals, but if these goals are poorly defined, then they have the opportunity to use their power to achieve their disastrous goals in a smart way.
There is no reason to think that the intellect itself is capable of forcing something or someone to act correctly and morally.
In fact, there is a possibility that some types of superintelligent systems will not obey moral rules even if they were possible Even more disturbing is the fact that, trying to explain some things to artificial intelligence, we are faced with deep practical and philosophical problems.
Human values are vague, these are complex problems that we cannot yet define well, and even if we could do this, we might not understand all the consequences of what we are trying to create.
Software based intelligence can very quickly eliminate the backlog from a person, and the capabilities of a machine can become dangerous.
The problem is that artificial intelligence can relate to biological intelligence in different ways: it can work faster on faster computers, its parts can be located on more computers, some versions of it can be tested and updated in the process, and there is also the possibility of introducing new algorithms that can dramatically increase performance.
Today, many people assume that a "breakthrough in the field of intelligence" is likely if the programs themselves have sufficient capabilities to produce more advanced programs.
If this kind of leap happens, then there will be a big difference between a smart system (or people telling it what to do) and the rest of the world.
Such a situation may well lead to disaster if the goals are incorrectly set.
The unusual thing about super intelligence is that we do not know whether a quick and powerful breakthrough in the development of intelligence is possible: maybe our current civilization as a whole is improving itself at the highest speed.
However, there is enough reason to believe that some technologies are able to move certain things forward much faster than the possibilities of improving their control by modern society.
In addition, we are not yet able to understand how dangerous some forms of superintelligence can be and how risk mitigation strategies will work.
It is very difficult to talk about future technologies that we do not yet have, or about intelligence that surpasses what we have.
Among the listed risks, this one has the most chances to become either truly large scale, or to remain just a mirage.
In general, this area has not yet been sufficiently studied, which is surprising.
Even in the 1950s and 1960s, people were completely confident that a superintelligence could be created "within a generation", but at that time, security issues were not given due attention.
Perhaps people then simply did not take their predictions seriously, and, most likely, considered it a problem of the distant future.
4. Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is the control of matter with atomic or molecular precision.
By itself, it does not pose a danger and, on the contrary, can be very good news for many variants of its application.
The problem is that, as in the field of biotechnology, growing opportunities also increase the potential for abuse, which is very difficult to protect against.
The big problem is not the notorious "grey goo" of self replicating nanomachines that devour everything in the world.
For this purpose, it will require the creation of very sophisticated devices.
It is difficult to create a machine that can reproduce itself: biology, by definition, copes better with such tasks.
Perhaps some maniacs will be able to do this, but there are more accessible fruits on the tree of destructive technologies.
The most obvious risk is that automatically precise production seems to be an ideal option for the cheap manufacture of such things as, for example, weapons.
In a world in which many governments will have the ability to "print" a large number of autonomous or semi autonomous weapons systems (including the possibility of increasing their production), the arms race can become very intense — and as a result, instability will increase, and therefore it may seem very tempting to strike the first blow before the enemy gets a big advantage.
Weapons can also be very small in size and very accurate: it can be a "smart poison" that can act not only as a nerve gas, but also choose its victims, or pervasive micro robots (gnatbots), miniature surveillance systems to keep the population in obedience — all this is quite possible.
In addition, nuclear weapons and installations that affect the climate can fall into the hands of intruders.
We cannot estimate the probability of existential risk coming from future nanotechnologies, but, apparently, they can be quite destructive simply because they are able to give everything we want.
5. The Mysterious Unknown
The most alarming possibility is that there is something deadly in the world, but we do not know what it is.
The silence in the sky may be evidence of this.
Is the absence of aliens explained by the fact that life and intelligence are very rare, or by the fact that intelligent life tends to be destroyed?
If there is a future Great Filter, then other civilizations should have noticed it, but even this did not help.
Whatever such a threat might be, it would be almost inevitable even if you were aware of its existence, regardless of who you are and what you really are.
We do not know anything about such threats (none of the threats listed above works like this), but they may exist.
Note that the presence of something unknown does not mean that we cannot reason about it.
In a wonderful article http://arxiv.org/abs/astro ph/0512204 by Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom, it is shown that a certain set of risks should have a coefficient less than one in a billion per year, if we take the relative age of the Earth as a basis.
You may be surprised that climate change and the fall of meteors are not included in the compiled list.
Climate change, no matter how terrible, is unlikely to make the entire planet uninhabitable (however, it may contain additional threats if our protection options are ineffective).
Meteors, of course, can wipe us off the face of the Earth, but in this case we must be very big losers.
Usually, a certain type of mammal has existed for about a million years.
Thus, the main coefficient of natural extinction is approximately one in a million per year.
This is significantly lower than the risk of a nuclear war, which, 70 years later, still remains the greatest threat to the continuation of our existence.
Accessibility heuristics make us overestimate the risks that are often discussed in the media, and downplay the significance of those that humanity has not yet encountered.
If we want to continue to exist in a million years, then we should correct this situation.
Original publication: The Five Biggest Threats To Human Existence Posted On 29/05/2014 14:16 0364
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