I donāt know that I agree with Pinker; even if heās right about the low base rate, ideas that reassure us about the limited impact of people with guns and poison may not extend to omnicidal attacks. Iām still much more worried about skilled groups of people working within corporations and governments, but I assume that our threat profile will shift more toward individuals over time.
This also seems reminiscent of Bostromās Vulnerable World Hypothesis (published a year after this thread, so fair enough that it didnāt make an appearance here :D). The abstract:
Scientific and technological progress might change peopleās capabilities or incentives in ways that would destabilize civilization. For example, advances in DIY biohacking tools might make it easy for anybody with basic training in biology to kill millions; novel military technologies could trigger arms races in which whoever strikes first has a decisive advantage; or some economically advantageous process may be invented that produces disastrous negative global externalities that are hard to regulate. This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable world: roughly, one in which there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i.e. unless it has exited the āsemi-anarchic default conditionā. Several counterfactual historical and speculative future vulnerabilities are analyzed and arranged into a typology. A general ability to stabilize a vulnerable world would require greatly amplified capacities for preventive policing and global governance. The vulnerable world hypothesis thus offers a new perspective from which to evaluate the risk-benefit balance of developments towards ubiquitous surveillance or a unipolar world order.
The most relevant part is Bostromās āeasy nukesā thought experiment.
I donāt know that I agree with Pinker; even if heās right about the low base rate, ideas that reassure us about the limited impact of people with guns and poison may not extend to omnicidal attacks. Iām still much more worried about skilled groups of people working within corporations and governments, but I assume that our threat profile will shift more toward individuals over time.
This also seems reminiscent of Bostromās Vulnerable World Hypothesis (published a year after this thread, so fair enough that it didnāt make an appearance here :D). The abstract:
The most relevant part is Bostromās āeasy nukesā thought experiment.