This also seems reminiscent of Bostrom’s Vulnerable World Hypothesis (published a year after this thread, so fair enough that it didn’t make an appearance here :D). The abstract:
Scientific and technological progress might change people’s 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 ‘semi-anarchic default condition’. 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 Bostrom’s “easy nukes” thought experiment.
I find this comment relatable, and agree with the sentiment.
I also think I’ve come across this sort of idea in this post somewhere in EA before. But I can’t recall where, so for one thing this post gives me something to link people to.[1] Plus this particular presentation feels somewhat unfamiliar, so I think I’ve learned something new from it. And I definitely found it an interesting refresher in any case.
In general, I think reading up on what’s been written before is good (see also this), but that there’s no harm in multiple posts with similar messages, and often there are various benefits. And EA thoughts are so spread out that it’s often hard to thoroughly check what’s come before.
So I think it’s probably generally a good norm for people to be happy to post things without worrying too much about the possibility they’re rehashing existing ideas, at least when the posts are quick to write.
[1] Also, I sort of like the idea of often having posts that serve well as places to link people to for one specific concept or idea, with the concept or idea not being buried in a lot of other stuff. Sort of like posts that just pull out one piece of a larger set of ideas, so that that piece can be easily consumed and revisited by itself. I try to do this sort of thing sometimes. And I think this post could serve that function too—I’d guess that wherever I came across a similar idea, there was a lot of other stuff there too, so this post might serve better as a reference for this one idea than that source would’ve.
ETA: A partial counter consideration is that some ideas may be best understood in a broader context, and may be misinterpreted without that context (I’m thinking along the lines of the fidelity model). So I think the “cover just one piece” approach won’t always be ideal, and is rarely easy to do well.