Let me pitch an idea to you: If Bostrom’s VWH were correct and eventually our picking of new balls from the urn will lead to our destruction, perhaps a solution is to split humanity into many sets of pickers, isolated from one another’s knowledge, in order to maximize the total amount of time humanity can experience the picking process for. One way to do this might be to colonize other planets in complete secrecy, provide as little technology as possible to the new inhabitants of those planets, and then destroy the knowledge that allowed us to do so, severing the connection between these worlds. They would get to experience their own set of discoveries, independent of our set, with both groups drawing white and black balls separately from each other. If we could also imbue them with the idea that this is the right course of action, perhaps they would also create more isolated sets of pickers, and know not to seek out those who had created them. What do you think?
This might be the best strategy if we’re all eventually doomed. Although it might turn out that the tech required to colonize planets comes after a bunch of black balls. At least like nuclear rockets and some bio-tech stuff seems likely.
Even Bostrom doesn’t think we’re inevitably doomed though. He just thinks that global government is the only escape hatch.
Max and Sharmake, note that Bostrom does not claim in this piece (or anywhere, as far as I know) that the vulnerable world hypothesis is true. So “global government is the only escape hatch” isn’t really his position. (Also note that we could have strong domain-specific global governance without a global government.)
Hey Max, great post!
Let me pitch an idea to you:
If Bostrom’s VWH were correct and eventually our picking of new balls from the urn will lead to our destruction, perhaps a solution is to split humanity into many sets of pickers, isolated from one another’s knowledge, in order to maximize the total amount of time humanity can experience the picking process for. One way to do this might be to colonize other planets in complete secrecy, provide as little technology as possible to the new inhabitants of those planets, and then destroy the knowledge that allowed us to do so, severing the connection between these worlds. They would get to experience their own set of discoveries, independent of our set, with both groups drawing white and black balls separately from each other. If we could also imbue them with the idea that this is the right course of action, perhaps they would also create more isolated sets of pickers, and know not to seek out those who had created them.
What do you think?
This might be the best strategy if we’re all eventually doomed. Although it might turn out that the tech required to colonize planets comes after a bunch of black balls. At least like nuclear rockets and some bio-tech stuff seems likely.
Even Bostrom doesn’t think we’re inevitably doomed though. He just thinks that global government is the only escape hatch.
Max and Sharmake, note that Bostrom does not claim in this piece (or anywhere, as far as I know) that the vulnerable world hypothesis is true. So “global government is the only escape hatch” isn’t really his position. (Also note that we could have strong domain-specific global governance without a global government.)
Which is essentially in his perspective, we are utterly doomed barring technological stagnation.
We can’t win: Either we get a bang x-risk from individuals, or we get a stable x-risk from states.