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Defense in depth

TagLast edit: 1 Apr 2023 21:21 UTC by Pablo

Defense in depth (DiD) (sometimes spelled defense-in-depth or defense in-depth) is the use of multiple defense layers to protect against an external threat. The concept was originally developed in the context of military strategy, but has since been applied to many other domains.[1]

Defense in depth against human extinction

A paper by Owen Cotton-Barratt, Max Daniel and Anders Sandberg proposes a defense in depth approach for handling risks of human extinction.[2] Such risks may be analyzed as involving three successive stages in the unfolding of a terminal event: the origination of the catastrophe, its attainment of global scale, and the destruction of everyone alive. To each of these three threats (origin, scaling and endgame) corresponds a particular type of defense layer: prevention, response and resilience. Besides serving to clarify the nature of the risks involved, this analysis can assist efforts to prioritize the allocation of resources among the different defense layers. In particular, if the threats that the layers protect against interact multiplicatively with one another, the impact on overall risk reduction of strengthening a particular layer will depend on the relative size of the change to the probability that the associated threat will get past it: halving the risk posed by a threat reduces total risk by the same degree regardless of the absolute magnitude of the change.

Further reading

Cotton-Barratt, Owen, Max Daniel & Anders Sandberg (2020) Defence in depth against human extinction: Prevention, response, resilience, and why they all matter, Global Policy, vol. 11, pp. 271–282.

Related entries

estimation of existential risk | existential risk | existential risk factor | existential security | global catastrophic risk | unknown existential risk | unprecedented risks

  1. ^

    Muehlhauser, Luke (2021) A personal take on longtermist AI governance, Effective Altruism Forum, July 21, fn. 19.

  2. ^

    Cotton-Barratt, Owen, Max Daniel & Anders Sandberg (2020) Defence in depth against human extinction: Prevention, response, resilience, and why they all matter, Global Policy, vol. 11, pp. 271–282.

The Web of Prevention

Will Bradshaw5 Feb 2020 4:51 UTC
28 points
7 comments3 min readEA link

Cot­ton‐Bar­ratt, Daniel & Sand­berg, ‘Defence in Depth Against Hu­man Ex­tinc­tion’

Pablo28 Jan 2020 19:24 UTC
26 points
3 comments1 min readEA link
(doi.org)

Some EA Fo­rum Posts I’d like to write

Linch23 Feb 2021 5:27 UTC
100 points
10 comments5 min readEA link

A per­sonal take on longter­mist AI governance

lukeprog16 Jul 2021 22:08 UTC
173 points
6 comments7 min readEA link

[Question] What “defense lay­ers” should gov­ern­ments, AI labs, and busi­nesses use to pre­vent catas­trophic AI failures?

alexlintz3 Dec 2021 14:24 UTC
37 points
3 comments1 min readEA link

Causal di­a­grams of the paths to ex­is­ten­tial catastrophe

MichaelA🔸1 Mar 2020 14:08 UTC
51 points
11 comments13 min readEA link