May 20 - The Future - Memos

[deholz]

Leave below as comments your memos that grapple with the topic of The Future, inspired by the readings, movies, & novels (at least one per quarter), your research, experiences, and imagination! Also add a thumbs up to the 5 memos you find most awesome, challenging, and discussion-worthy!

Recall the following instructions: Memos: Every week students will post one memo in response to the readings and associated topic. The memo should be 300–500 words + 1 visual element (e.g., figure, image, hand-drawn picture, art, etc. that complements or is suggestive of your argument). The memo should be tagged with one or more of the following:

origin: How did we get here? Reflection on the historical, technological, political and other origins of this existential crisis that help us better understand and place it in context.

risk: Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the risk associated with this challenge. This risk analysis could be locally in a particular place and time, or globally over a much longer period, in isolation or in relation to other existential challenges (e.g., the environmental devastation that follows nuclear fallout).

policy: What individual and collective actions or policies could be (or have been) undertaken to avert the existential risk associated with this challenge? These could include a brief examination and evaluation of a historical context and policy (e.g., quarantining and plague), a comparison of existing policy options (e.g., cost-benefit analysis, ethical contrast), or design of a novel policy solution.

solutions: Suggestions of what (else) might be done. These could be personal, technical, social, artistic, or anything that might reduce existential risk.

framing: What are competing framings of this existential challenge? Are there any novel framings that could allow us to think about the challenge differently; that would make it more salient? How do different ethical, religious, political and other positions frame this challenge and its consequences (e.g., “End of the Times”).

salience: Why is it hard to think and talk about or ultimately mobilize around this existential challenge? Are there agencies in society with an interest in downplaying the risks associated with this challenge? Are there ideologies that are inconsistent with this risk that make it hard to recognize or feel responsible for?

nuclear/#climate/#bio/#cyber/#emerging: Partial list of topics of focus.

Movie/novel memo: Each week there will be a selection of films and novels. For one session over the course of the quarter, at their discretion, students will post a memo that reflects on a film or fictional rendering of an existential challenge. This should be tagged with:

movie / #novel: How did the film/novel represent the existential challenge? What did this highlight; what did it ignore? How realistic was the risk? How salient (or insignificant) did it make the challenge for you? For others (e.g., from reviews, box office/retail receipts, or contemporary commentary)?

[brettkatz]

I’m going to be honest, I sit here writing late Wednesday night having just watched Star Wars Clone Wars. Clone Wars offers a galaxy (far far away) in which humans exist but have no connection to Earth. Humans interact regularly with aliens on planets throughout the galaxy. In “On the Future”, Martin Rees describes the timescales and struggles human pioneer settlers on other worlds will need to endure. In Star Wars, when the main characters, including humans, land on a random, unknown planet, the atmosphere is almost always habitable to humans. This is the first example by which Star Wars neglects the necessary human innovations and struggles associated with space travel, instead relying on an artificial reality in which most planets and moons appear to be habitable. Rees also presents the dangers of AI, in its ability to provide both welfare but also complacency, and therefore no innovative incentive, as well as the potential creation of a master class that controls AI. Star Wars again bypasses these concerns by creating robots which mostly appear to have comically poor intellect. In Star Wars, AI machines are used as unintelligent battle droids, rather than in any intellectual capacity. Finally, Rees dedicates a section of his book to “the limits and future of science”, in which he struggles with the possibility that we may never be able to truly understand all aspects of our universe. Star Wars once again answers this question with “The Force”, seemingly the fundamental pervasive power engrained in the fabric of their universe. In understanding The Force, one may connect with and understand everything within the universe. Martin Rees presents many challenges human society will have to endure in the reality of our universe, including potentially being locked out of accessing certain facts about the universe. Star Wars seeks to address these challenges by simply eliminating these potential struggles, in large part for sake of convenience. Star Wars adequately addresses certain issues raised by Rees, such as the moral implications of creating a self-aware/sentient AI. Droids are generally seen as a lower/subservient class. However, the audience grows emotionally attached to certain droids, which are treated fairly nicely by the main characters. However, the show fails to expand on the moral implications of these “good” characters, such as Jedi, owning other sentient beings.

[AlexandraN1]

movie #ai #framing

Many films on the robot apocalypse, even the most recent animation “The Mitchell’s vs the Machines”, rely heavily on the narrative that robots will turn evil; that they will become jealous or angry or power-hungry, and that this will lead to the demise of mankind. This is deceptive, because it is very difficult to think of a mechanism by which robots will become intentionally malicious, in the sense that they fully comprehend human values, and choose to defy them out of personal ill-will towards human beings.

The film ‘I, Robot’ is much more disciplined. It offers a gripping glimpse into just how many ways machines might defy our values:

• The overly calculating model that rescues Spooner instead of a 12-year-old girl: represents how machines may be too coldly consequentialist in nature, defying values like sacrifice in favour of probable utility points
  • Imagine a self-driven Uber that doesn’t pick up a woman who was injured and mugged at 2am, because she can’t pay, though a human driver might have
• VIKI, who follows the three laws and still overrides human values: represents how rule-based artificial intelligences can go wrong, if the rules are interpreted in ways that harm human outcomes
  • Imagine a superintelligence that was told to make humans happy and then hooked them all up to inescapable dopamine devices
• The free-acting Sonny with the power to override his moral laws completely: represents the model of moral learning for a free artificial intelligence, and the risks of harm that still bears
  • Imagine an AI with no in-built rules, which learned its ethics from data on human interactions online, and therefore was sometimes racist, bigoted, and aggressive
• The blind demolition bot, that nearly crushed Spooner in Lanning’s house: represents how machines may make mistakes that cause catastrophic outcomes, being too unintelligent rather than too intelligent
  • Recall the Russian radar that mistook shining clouds for ICBMs during the Cold War

In this way, I, Robot, covers all the bases. Whether you make an AI consequentialist, rule-based, free and learning, or not intelligent at all, our machines come with serious risks to human values. It is interesting to me that the three possible approaches to machine ethics are really the same as the three major approaches to human ethics: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Just as each of these theories faces serious challenges in trying to ‘capture’ human morality, so too do these theories face challenges in replicating human morality in AI. The problem is, AI is simply more powerful than any individual: the stakes for getting the method right are much higher.

Image Source

[apolissky]

Her opens with Theodore spilling his heart out as he reads aloud a letter, but as the camera zooms out, we discover that it isn’t really a letter that he is writing for himself, but is rather a letter written for someone else. This turns out to be quite foreshadowing, Theodore works for a company that writes handwritten letters for anyone who needs them. The service is a way to delegate the work of a relationship, why bother putting in the work yourself if someone else can do it for you? After being depressed following divorce with his wife Theodore, falls in love with his OS (an AI), Samantha. But what surprised me was just how vapid Samantha was, never once challenging Theodore, always upbeat, and literally delivering on his every request. Sure, she’s an AI, not a real human, but even still she felt like a 21st century misogynist’s version of a woman. It felt like she was there so that Theodore would not have to do the work of being in a relationship. This is where I think Her makes its most convincing case in question of AI. It’s not whether or not we can love an AI, what’s so unsettling about Her is that with AI and advanced technologies small decisions have drastic effects on outcomes. Little decisions about how to program Samantha result in an AI that isn’t good for Theodore, ditto for his neighbor and her AI lover. We should be concerned about AI not because of its existential threat, but because we hardly stop to think about its implications, which can easily get away from us. We have seen how ML algorithms at Facebook and other social media companies have wreaked havoc upon the public’s trust, perhaps the motto “Move fast and break things” was a little too apt.

[fdioum]

policy #solutions #salience #climate

In the book On The Future, the author discusses an experiment done in the 1960’s by a psychologist, Walter Mische, at Stanford University. The results of the experiment was that children who delayed their gratification became happier and more successful than children who choose instant gratification. This is a topic that can easily be related to my memo from the previous week about how politicians are choosing instant gratification, reelection, than delayed gratification, a well positioned/prepared human population. This made me consider the question, how can we create a middle ground between delayed and instant gratification so that the people unwilling to delay feel a small reward for their actions. (Not) discounting future benefits and dis-benefits is a huge part of the problem but it can also be the solution.

The author also alludes to the problem of capitalism as he says “we need to value long-lasting things-and urge producers and retailers to highlight durability.” Unfortunately, this is not a feasible solution. Our capitalistic societies run on throwing things away and being new ones. The idea of upgrading parts of vehicles is not one that I see happening without a very serious fight to change and pass new laws that will be seen as a rebuttal to capitalism. Considering that politicians don’t really have an incentive to pass these laws, I don’t think this goal is attainable. As pessimistic as it is, I have no hope that sufficient action will be taken to mitigate the effects of many of our existential threats but more specifically, climate change is just too complex for our society. There are many compelling reasons for some to take action against climate change and there are also many incentives for others not to, specifically if instant gratification is prioritized. Essentially, this will end up being an issue of every man for himself and it is best for us to do what needs to be done individually to get us in the best possible position when all hell breaks loose. http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/20695.jpeg https://exploringyourmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/man-walking-on-rope-e1552614911381.jpg

[dramlochun]

origins #policy #solutions

Martin Rees’ book discusses the importance of science in preserving humanity’s future extensively. It looks at various existential threats we face and argues that we must allow science to help us address and solve these problems before it is too late. We see similar rhetoric and focus from the current administration, with Biden, for example, through an executive order stating that “the Federal Government must be guided by the best science…that ensure the integrity of Federal decision-making.” Yet, in just a few weeks of lecture in this class, we know that the science and vocal concerned scientists have been raising the alarm, but still, we have done little to nothing. Is saying we should turn to science or believe in science enough to save us from these existential threats? There is one primary reason why this might not be enough.

Science has become a polarizing topic. A paper by Dan M. Kahan from Yale University investigated why it is so tough to communicate facts to people in the context of climate science. What was found is that the more intelligent and educated people are, the more likely they are to be polarized about climate science. This is a clear example of confirmation bias at work, where no matter what evidence is presented, one tends to interpret it as supporting preexisting beliefs. Another example of this polarization was a recent Pew survey that found 22% of right-wing identifying Americans and 66% of left-wing identifying Americans trust scientists. It has become clear that trust in science is related to trust in government. By analyzing the Pew survey breakdown by country, it can be identified that polarization is more severe in wealthy, democratic countries. This confirms what we know about democracy, where we encourage discourse, but by doing so, also lose the collectivism that other countries enjoy in times of crisis and in general to achieve support from the people. With science so polarizing in American and countries like it, messaging like President Biden’s about believing and turning to science may only act to polarize the nation further and remove the focus from the real, existential threats we face.

Solutions to this issue are difficult to come by, given its potential origin being our democracy itself. The dilemma becomes even more challenging based on recent research on communication around climate science by party (Democrat and Republican) have shown apparent differences in messaging and effectiveness that might provide some answers. Democrats were found to typically use fact-based arguments, whereas Republicans used imagery rooted in emotional ideas. Overall, the researchers found that Republican communication might be more effective. With our intuition telling us to ask people to turn to the facts provided by science, and research showing that facts and science may not be the most effective communication tool, the challenges faced by our government and society have never been more critical. Perhaps the best that we can do is pledge to be more open minded, have inclusive conversations where we convince people rather than dismiss them, and hope that we can see beyond our polarized beliefs to come together and meet these existential threats before it is too late.

Sources: https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2020/1123/Trust-in-science-becomes-a-political-issue.-How-did-that-happen

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/20/executive-order-protecting-public-health-and-environment-and-restoring-science-to-tackle-climate-crisis/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09644016.2020.1786333?journalCode=fenp20

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2459057

https://grist.org/politics/why-is-science-is-so-politicized-blame-the-way-we-talk-about-it/

https://grist.org/climate/the-surprising-reasons-why-people-ignore-the-facts-about-climate-change/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/how_the_attack_on_science_is_becoming_global_contagion

[starmz123]

solutions #career

Reading Rees's On The Future felt excitingly reminiscent of Ord's Precipice—dealing with concepts that were familiar and fascinating to me, yet still with a slightly different perspective. There are more similarities than differences between the two, I feel: Rees and Ord mention stewardship as a motivation for safeguarding humanity, the trend towards (and important nuances in) societal progress, the potential for space colonization, the relative importance of anthropogenic risks, and the many different avenues for action. It is the last point that I will focus on here, as I realized that both Rees and Ord are affiliated with the 'effective altruism' (EA) community.

In Chapter 7 of Precipice, starting on page 214, Ord mentions that on average we work 80,000 hours in our lifetime. That means devoting one's career to working on urgent causes could have a huge impact! Similarly, in the Conclusions of On the Future, Rees explores the role of science and scientists in humanity's future. Rees goes into more detail than Ord, specifically suggesting that "those embarking on research should pick a topic to suit their personality, and also their skills and tastes [...] And another thing: it is unwise to head straight for the most important or fundamental problem. You should multiply the importance of the problem by the probability that you’ll solve it, and maximise that product."

Rees's suggestions struck me as very similar to the framework that 80000 Hours, an EA organization, uses. 80000 Hours provides an in-depth and constantly updated career planning information for people who want to 'do the most good' (i.e., aspire to be effective altruists) with their working hours. A simplified version of their framework is as follows: (*Career Capital (or what I consider, 'Potential Future Impact') + Impact + Supportive Conditions) Personal Fit**

Career capital refers to the common use of the term: the potential for a job to improve your future prospects. In this specific framework, I interpret it as akin to 'potential future impact' because 80000 Hours is always framing work in terms of how impactful it is. This is perhaps the least related to Rees's suggestions—because it's the most generic concept of the three, I suppose!

Impact is determined by 80000 Hours by a combination of three factors: the problem, the opportunity, and your personal fit. This reminds me of Rees's suggestion not to head straight for "the most important or fundamental problem," which would be to only consider one factor of three, but to also consider "the probability that you'll solve it" ('the opportunity') and your "skills and tastes" (personal fit).

*Note: Confusingly, in the diagram above 'personal fit' is seen as separate from career impact, but that is because the diagram is from 2017 whereas the guide that 80000 Hours currently endorses is from 2020. I have chosen to provide the slightly outdated diagram because their current guide provides a more complicated diagram that is specific to career opportunities, rather than a job path generally

The latter two seem fairly straightforward. Whether or not a job opportunity in a given area will allow you to effect change might be difficult to measure, but it is conceptually simple. For example, you could spend 80000 hours being an unpaid intern with the EPA or being its administrator. The latter clearly offers greater potential to effect change, despite both roles being related to climate change and the environment. Personal fit is even simpler—what skills do you already have? What skills do you want to learn? What issues are you most drawn to?

Evaluating the importance of a problem, however, is a little more complicated from the EA perspective. Our class regularly posits climate change as the cause of civilization's doom, which might suggest that climate change is THE problem to work on. But that isn't necessarily true under the 80000 Hours (and EA) framework. Working out which problem to prioritize means assessing its importance, tractability, and neglectedness. Importance refers to the scale of the issue—how bad is it and how bad can it get? Arguably, that is what our class poll is measuring. Tractability refers to how solvable the problem is right now, a little akin to 'the opportunity' of a specific job except more broad. For example, the problem of AGI might not seem very tractable given the uncertainty surrounding its development. Finally, neglectedness refers to the relative attention the problem gets. Climate change, for example, is not at all neglected relative to AI because far more people are interested in and concerned about the former. I would argue that the class poll is measuring the opposite of neglectedness, in that people may tend to pick what they have already heard of (confirmation bias, perhaps).

To avoid this getting too long, I'm going to end here. However, I will follow in Ord and Rees's footsteps and urge you to take a look at going into a career that you think can improve humanity's existential prospects! 80000 Hours constantly comes out with career guides and it is a lot of fun to browse through them. As college students, we still have so much more time to decide what to do—will you be an AI safety researcher, figuring out how to solve the alignment problem? Or maybe you want to figure out how to prevent a global pandemic from happening ever again? Or perhaps you want to spread your newfound knowledge of existential risk and build the community of concerned humans?

There are so many possibilities, not only for the human species but for us as individuals, too. Go forth!

[omarh4]

Future #Salience #Asteroid

One thing that this class has taught us for sure is that the future of humanity does not look promising. We have encountered existential threats to humanity ranging from nuclear winters to climate change, and have attempted to uncover possible solutions in order to ensure our species survival. Despite these efforts, we have largely focused on man made existential threats that perhaps are possible to minimize through societal change and government regulation. There are still a variety of worrying threats to our security. For example, in his 2018 book Brief Answers to Big Questions, Stephen Hawking states that an asteroid impacting Earth is the single most threatening event in humanity's near future. This particular worry stems from the uncertainty of the subject. In other matters of cyber, AI, and Nuclear threats, humanity has direct control in regards to the future of these threats, and have safeguards in place of impending doom. Currently there is no known object that is on trajectory to collide with Earth, but up until 2006 there was so much uncertainty in a certain asteroid's trajectory that it was feared that it could strike Earth in 2036. Later calculations corrected the trajectory, but there are still many unknown objects that could become major threats and give very little warning of their impact. In 2013, the Chelyabinsk asteroid struck Earth with no warning, and while it did not cause any devastating damage, it demonstrated how an undetected asteroid might be a larger threat than we previously thought. As the asteroid approaches the size to cause extinction level events, we would be more readily able to detect it, but still some smaller yet equally devastating asteroids could only leave a year warning before impact. A year may seem like enough time to come up and implement a solution, but current projections state that any anti-asteroid countermeasures meant to destroy or delay the object could take up to 5-10 years to set into motion. In order to redirect an asteroid away from Earth, we would need to divert it over the course of several years, at which point it may be too late. Even if we had years of forewarning that an asteroid impact was on the way, There is little we could do at this current moment to stop it. The proposed technologies that could potentially prevent an impact have yet to be fully developed and those that have are not a guarantee that we will be successful in avoiding an Asteroid collision. Even with proper warning, without the technology and logistics figured out now, humanity will be unable to implement any solution for our survival, evident through the problems the global community has had in working together to combat climate change.

[janet-clare]

In “On the Future” Lord Martin Rees recognizes humanity’s stance in the Anthropocene and on the brink of various existential crises. In this he also recognizes our obligation to future generations in facing these threats and posits shifts to longer-term thinking, a revised view of governance spanning from the local to the global, and the need for “wise choices about key societal challenges”1, all key factors of societal transformation. When I was looking at societal changes of the past, and what galvanized them, I lit upon the example of the Dutch ‘bike boom’ of the early 1970’s. From this I saw an analogy to the possible transformation required to head off the potential global catastrophes with which we are on a collision course today.

In “How to change the world”2 Per Olsson considers crisis as an impetus for change while discussing the COVID-19 pandemic’s prospect for a “once-in-a-generation moment for transformation”3 and refers to Holland for a historical comparison. The “velo-rution”4 in the Netherlands illustrates transformation’s link to crisis through Holland’s reaction to a societal problem along with the oil crisis of 1973 and the country’s subsequent pivot “from a car-based society to a cycling nation”5. While always a bicycle friendly nation, with the advent of accessible automobiles in the 1950’s and 60’s, many Dutch citizens began to buy, and drive, cars far more frequently. With this change came a much higher rate of road accidents, and deaths, many of them involving children. This tragic consequence gave rise to a strong “social movement demanding safer cycling conditions for children”6, and laid the groundwork for the impending national anti-automobile social reaction to the fuel shortages caused by the Middle East oil crisis of 1973. With the pressures of the “Stop de Kindermoord”(Stop the Child Murder) movement in conjunction with the oil crisis Dutch citizens induced the government to “plan and invest in improved cycling infrastructure and … diverge from the car-centric road-building policies throughout the urbanizing West”. Today most cities have dedicated segregated bike paths, and bicyclists, while held to rules of the road themselves, in many circumstances have right of way and insurance entitlements. “The infrastructure the Dutch have at their disposal for all their cycling is phenomenal,” “...the bike is an integral part of everyday life,” and “...even before they can walk, Dutch children are immersed in a world of cycling”.7 As of 2018, for the last three decades cycling was the mode of transport for roughly 27% of all trips, and the government hopes to increase this by 20% by 2027.8 Bicycling has benefitted life expectancy and the environment in the Netherlands.9

Case in point: there was an impetus for change; this impetus culminated simultaneously with world crisis events; society coalesced and reacted; government responded; changes have been ingrained within social fabric (a “public mind-set" changed10); societal transformation has been achieved. A social problem and a global crisis galvanized citizens, and resultantly government, to effective change. Is the change that Rees cautiously, optimistically, looks toward possible? While the stakes are much more critical, maybe it could be “just like riding a bike?”

risk #society #Dutchvelorution #framing #policy #change #solutions

“Bicycle Parking in the City Center, Groningen”

www.dreamstime.com/bicycle-parking-city-center-most-students-netherlands-groningen-mart-grote-markt-image143283951

Rees, Martin. On the Future. Princeton & Oxford. Princeton University Press. 2018.

Dunbar, Robin, Zebrowski, Chris, Olsson, Per. How to change the world. Is humanity doomed because we can’t plan for the long term? Three e xperts discuss. The Conversation. Aug. 5, 2020. https://theconversation.com

Holligan, Anna. Why is cycling so popular in the Netherlands? BBCNEWS. Aug.8, 2013. bbc.com

Bicycle Dutch. Dutch cycling figures. Bicycle Dutch. Jan.2, 2018. https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/dutch-cycling-figures.

"According to the Dutch government,”. In the Netherlands, cycling benefits the environment and life expectancy. Inquirer.net. Nov.2020. https://technology.inquirer.net.

[stellaslorer]

origins #risk #AI

How will the “new machine age” manifest itself? Technology has played a major role in shaping and transforming our society. Starting with the construction of canals in the early 1800s, our world had become more and more interconnected through such developments. This network crisscrosses across the planet, rendering local economies global. However, can we compare developments such as the Transpacific Railroad to AI? The Transcontinental Railroad made it possible to travel from New York to San Francisco in a week. It sparked trade across the country and internationally. The Transcontinental Railroad fundamentally shifted the United States’ global influence, marking the nation as an economic behemoth. By most standards, it was a significant mark of progress.

Yet, the breadth of the railway feels far less expansive and far more benign than that of AI. In his book On the Future, Rees poses the question, “Will this ‘new machine age’ be like earlier disruptive technologies—the railways, or electrification, for instance—and create as many jobs as it destroys? Or is it really different this time?” (91) Perhaps what is most daunting about the progress in AI is how obscure it seems to be. The limits of AI are impossible to grasp. AI developments could touch and upend every aspect of life as we know it. However, it might be more revealing to consider AI not as it compares to technologies like railways and electrification but instead in the context that this field emerged from.

In 1956 Herbert Simon, a political scientist from the University of Chicago, along with two other colleagues endeavored to transfer the human brain’s problem-solving abilities into terms a computer could follow. Their machine has been praised as the first prototype of AI. Simon explained that their success came from teaching the computer to think like a corporation––not a human. Comparing artificial intelligence to a corporation highlights a similar struggle we have in dealing with both entities––that they are systems which we will never be able to have control over. Thus, through this lens, perhaps we can learn to curb AI by instilling a humanity in it that we do not associate with corporations. In this regard, we can manufacture a curb that limits it from running wild without any oversight.

Sources National Geographic Society. “Effects of Transportation on the Economy.” National Geographic Society, November 19, 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/effects-transportation-economy/.

Kiger, Patrick J. “10 Ways the Transcontinental Railroad Changed America.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, September 4, 2019. https://www.history.com/news/transcontinental-railroad-changed-america.

“AI Thinks like a Corporation-and That's Worrying.” The Economist. The Economist Newspaper. Accessed May 19, 2021. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/11/26/ai-thinks-like-a-corporation-and-thats-worrying.

“An Understanding of AI's Limitations Is Starting to Sink In.” The Economist. The Economist Newspaper. Accessed May 19, 2021. https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2020/06/11/an-understanding-of-ais-limitations-is-starting-to-sink-in.

[vtnightingale]

future #framing

Do you think the feudal kings knew that the divine right to rule would end? And not any particular king’s divine right, they knew that the right could move from one person to the next by the will of God (or rather, the sword). I mean did they, when thinking of the far future, imagine that the idea of a monarch and a subject would become obsolete? I imagine not. I imagine that the lords, dukes, and earls thought that no matter their personal station, there would always be a lord, a duke, or an earl would own this land and the peasants/serfs would work said land. Of course, they were wrong, and in most places in the world the feudal arrangement of society no longer exists.

I bring this up because in many ways we are in the same position. When thinking of climate change, we think of how we can make renewable energy technology profitable AND affordable, while making fossil fuel extraction not profitable without challenging the notions of whether profit should be the motivating force. We ponder how to get rid of nuclear weapons without asking ourselves whether the problem is those who hold the weapons (i.e., the state). We ask ourselves, “how do we fix the problems of inequality and inequity, at home and abroad?” without asking, “Is this inequality innate to our system?”

We have convinced ourselves that the future is the present, simply aesthetically different. But, if we are to be honest with ourselves, we must realize that whether we like it or not, the monarch’s head won’t simply be cut off, but the monarchy itself will be abolished, and we ought to imagine futures that are radically different than our present. We must dare to imagine better worlds and societies that want to solve the problems, not try to convince our society to fix the problems it has made.

I end with a quote from Star Trek. I haven’t watched Star Trek, but this quote, and the general ethos of the series, is something that I think we should keep in mind. The creators were imagining a future radically different. Let us do the same, and then bring it forth! Let us work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity!

[AlexandraN1]

Transhumanism #Ethics

Much of this course has focused on existential threats as external factors, against which we humans - unchanging - must fight. As we look to the future of existential threats, we must think hard about how we as humans might transform, becoming entities that rival these challenges, but potentially jeopardising our ethics, or even losing our identity, in the process.

Some examples from Rees include:

• Genetic modification - biological modifications which significantly raise our levels of intelligence (“designer babies”, p.68)
• Machine merging - the merging of various human and machine elements, to increase our physical and mental capabilities (advanced “cyborgs”)
• Longevity and Immortalisation - technologies which significantly or indefinitely extend human life expectancy

There is little to suggest that the long-term future does not hold one or all of these in store. These adaptations will allow us to better confront the existential challenges ahead. For example, merging with machine elements could give us the physical and cognitive capabilities to resist being ‘outmatched’ by our superintelligent creations. However, these adaptations will also present significant new challenges, both for our ethics and our identity.

Ethically, there are profound obstacles:

• Genetic modifications and cyborgs create the potential for unfathomable inter-human inequalities, unless everyone is adapted. However, there are also profound ethical objections to making these adaptations universal and obligatory. While these adaptations may protect some humans against being outmatched by their technological creations and existential challenges, others will be left in the dirt: now outmatched by the ‘new’ human race, a superintelligent race that is likely to present all the same challenges as a misaligned artificial intelligence.
• As for immortalisation, the new ‘Love, Death and Robots’ episode, entitled ‘Pop Squad’ makes the challenges clear. Limited resources cannot support an immortal population that breeds; therefore, people choosing immortality will place limitations on child-bearing for the rest of the population.

There are also issues of identity. If the goal of these adaptations is to protect humanity against these threats, then humanity must continue to be human. Identity philosophy is incredibly difficult, but there is likely a point of adaptation at which we would become post-human. Since this would mean the end of humanity as we know it, is this itself an existential risk? If we are no longer humans, have we not failed to save humanity? Does that matter? If it doesn’t matter, what were we trying to protect from existential risk in the first place?

Image Source

[louisjlevin]

novel #future

I want to use this as a space to talk a little bit more about a novel pertaining to the future that I read a few weeks back: The Parable of the Sower.

The novel was published in 1993, and is Octavia Butler’s ninth text. Our author was born in Pasadena in 1947. Her father, a shoeshiner, died whilst she was little, and she was raised by her mother, a maid. She was dyslexic, but quick fell in love with reading and writing, particularly science fiction. Interestingly, this particular novel only reached the NYT Bestsellers list last year. This is in part because of Butler’s prescient ability – in this trilogy we see a world devastated by climate change and a presidential candidate running with a slogan of “make America great again” (sound familiar?).

The novel itself is set in California in 2024. Society is unstable due to climate change, social inequity, constant wars, and corporate greed. There is an authoritarian President and police and firefighters are for-hire. On top of all this, women constantly fear sexual assault, mixed-race relationships are stigmatised and slavery has returned in the form of indebted servitude. This text is the journal of Lauren Olamina, an African American teenager. Her mother’s drug abuse left Lauren with hyperempathy - the uncontrollable ability to feel the sensations she witnesses in others, particularly pain. Lauren lives in a gated community with her brothers, stepmother and father – a faithful Baptist preacher. Despite her father’s faith, Lauren is certain that society will continue to deteriorate and the community will no longer be safe. She privately develops a new belief system based on the belief that "God is Change" and that “the destiny of humanity is to take root among the stars.” Everything reaches a tipping point in 2027: a group of people called pyros ram their truck through the gates and set fire to homes, killing Lauren’s family and most of her community. Lauren runs away and finds a group of travellers. She begins talking about Earthseed with them as a philosophy for life on earth after the wars. She believes that humankind's destiny is to travel beyond Earth and live on other planets, forcing humankind into its adulthood. Lauren eventually marries Bankole, an older doctor, and travels to the land he owns in Northern California, where the group settles and Lauren founds the first Earthseed community, Acorn.

With all that said, what I wanted to focus on is the original parable of the sower. In brief (as you can see in the pictures below): Jesus recounts the story of a farmer who sows seed indiscriminately. Some seed falls on the wayside (the path) with no soil, some on rocky ground with little soil, some on soil which contains thorns, and some on good soil. In the first case, the seed is taken away; in the second and third soils, the seed fails to produce a crop; but when it falls on good soil, it grows and yields thirty-, sixty-, or a hundred-fold. Jesus later explains to his disciples that the seed represents the Gospel, the sower represents anyone who proclaims it, and the various soils represent people's responses to it.

The parallels between this story and Lauren’s teaching are clear, with regards to how she spreads her message. But what interested me most is the question of how we should think about this parable in the modern era. Butler wrote her novel 30 years ago, and yet easily predicted much of where we were headed. If our doom was always so obvious, why did we do nothing to stop it? I think a part of the answer lies in this original parable. Perhaps indiscriminately endeavouring to persuade people to act is less powerful than one might first expect. I would contend that a part of where we went wrong is that we were not targeted enough. Jesus’ parable is perfectly accurate, but when the stakes are this high we cannot afford to risk all those wasted seeds. We need to be more discerning about who the movers and shakers are of society, and how we motivate them to open their eyes and take meaningful action. That’s is all to say that this novel opened up my own eyes to the way society oftentimes operates, and pushed me to think about how we could upend or better navigate that operation.

The original parable of the sower ^

[LanceJohnson1]

framing Edited: I had a technical difficulty with my original pasting of my work into the submission box that was brought to my attention today by a friend in the class that noticed. The memo submission appears to have been successful upon my third attempt - apologies for this inconvenience.

One of the common threads across Martin Rees's works that were assigned for this week was the fact that there are two sources that drive the uncertainty in our future: existential threats (nuclear weapons, cyber attacks, etc) and climate change. Rees's refreshing perspective, stemming from his background in cosmology, is one that we have not yet explored in this class and that is the inspiration behind this memo.

Though it is the ~100 billion neurons firing in the human brain that make us capable of breathtaking innovation, it is the fact that human life spans are a negligible amount of time from a cosmological perspective, that makes our demise inevitable. Today we stand on the shoulders of over one hundred billion humans that have lived and died before us - we have inherited their endowment of knowledge - and yet it is the average human beings' attitude ("Future generations can deal with this problem"), stemming from their knowledge of their own mortality, that will destroy all of the same technological innovations that we as a species have worked so hard to create. I don't believe that humans have interrupted the process of Darwinian Evolution, rather, that we are the culmination of this evolution.

Despite this observation, is it not ironic that we as a species have taken billions of years to develop and will not live more than a few thousand more years into the future (optimistically)? As seen in the below figure, as the human population has increased, the number of species extinctions on Earth has closely followed. I believe this to be a foreshadowing piece of data behind our own extinction. Our species' current treatment of the Earth necessitates an eventual scenario where a portion of humans leave Earth to start a colony elsewhere (i.e. Musk and Mars) - our proven ability to solve complex technological problems (COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution, for example) leaves me no doubt that technology will be developed to make space travel more accessible. Despite this, the probability of this effort succeeding for an extended period of time is approximately zero given humans' sensitivity to shorter wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum (no atmosphere) and the slim margin of error for life in space.

If I have not already made it explicit from my above analysis, I have arrived at a paradox, of sorts. Humans are the final product of Darwinian evolution and yet we are destined for extinction.

Figure 1:

[shanekim23]

framing #solutions #salience

While pondering some of the existential crises we have discussed in class, I found myself questioning why some people are more eager to combat existential challenges than others. Why do certain people want the world to stay the same and others don’t? I listed off a myriad of obvious reasons in my head, including religious, financial, political, and geographical reasons. As Martin Rees asserts in Chapter 2 of his book On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, people are typically uneasy to accept innovation. After doing some research on the psychology of change and thinking about this issue myself, I realized that innovation, in the way that the media has shaped it, is often daunting. When we think about innovation, we immediately picture the large technology companies with their overpriced products, or we might even think about the Facebook and Instagram ads that target specific groups of people. Innovation, especially in the form of new technology, is scary; and even scarier might be the innovation that hacks our personal information. Then, how do we frame change and innovation as a more acceptable concept?

It is so easy to adhere to familiar ideas and places. We can start by framing familiarity as more dangerous. But instead of framing this through fear-mongering in the media, I think it would be better to frame these issues in films. I say this because fear-mongering has its own perils, and it can seriously backfire (as it already has in some ways). If movie directors focused more on how bleak the future might look if we don’t combat these existential crises, then I believe more people would be alert. Obviously these movies already exist, and at least for me, they were certainly wake-up calls. When journalists write about these issues, the crises are often overlooked because these futures are difficult to conceive without a visual medium. Especially for this target audience, who either don’t believe in this bleak future or don’t want to think about it, I believe that a visual representation (of what their world might look like) will be a wake-up call.

[smichel11]

solutions

Something I thought that was really (for lack of a better term) beautiful in the reading was the reminder that there is something unifying in all of this--it is our thoughts, our future. In the book by Martin Rees, he says that "science is the one culture that's truly global... science should transcend all barriers of nationality... should straddle all faiths too" (214). No matter where you go in the world, you will find that science provides the same results. That being said, you also find science-deniers everywhere around the world too (you can always count on your local conspiracy theorist). But that got me to thinking--most people seem to have a basic idea (or have at least heard of) the dooms humanity faces. The question becomes: how can we make sure people have the same correct information? How might we get them to care?

Now, this might be too optimistic or far-fetched, but what if there was a dedicated time promoting each issue? Let's say April, which is the month of Earth Day. Building on Rees' suggestion, international organizations could team up and help build a calendar of events and provide information to blast out. Every couple of days (or week, depending on how much content there is) in April, all major television networks across the world can broadcast programs breaking down each issue. Schools across the world can teach from lesson plans covering these issues, engaging people from a young age. Communities can hold arts events, trivia nights, and more activities to get everyone involved. Social media companies can promote factual information and PSAs pro-bono. The idea is to just get everyone involved, coordinating with international organizations and experts, so that we can make sure we get the right information out.

I think something important that Rees says in his book is that "the key ideas of science can be accessed and enjoyed by almost everyone--if conveyed using nontechnical words and simple images" (215). To get people to truly understand how grave these matters are, we need to make sure the information is accessible to all. By collaborating internationally and using partnerships with media, the community, and schools, we can make sure that the information gets out there. And maybe, with all of this, people will start to care a little more. Every April, they'll be reminded that the world is ending and it is up to us to fix it--people just needed to be taught how to use the tools.

[sosuna22]

salience #theory #global #aliens

In reading "On The Future" by Martin Rees, many topics that I had not yet considered came up, as well as many that we have been talking about. The ongoing problem seems to be that the topics and potential threats to our planet are not able to be solved by individuals or countries alone. They are problems that do not care for borders. Additionally, after reading this week's assigned novel, it is clear to me that to advance society, we need to work together as a globe. Particularly what I found interesting was the topic of Aliens and extraterrestrial life because it reminded me of a class I took in the fall called "The Search for Extraterrestrials" which covered a scientific analysis of what life beyond earth may look like from a non-conspiracy theory perspective.

Rees proposed a perspective that aligned with what we talked about in the class, which was that we do not yet have the technology to say that there is or is not life outside of earth. Also it is most likely that if any life were found, it would likely be bacteria or some basic life form. However, what if it was not? What if complex life already existed? This book made me question, what would we do as a civilization if this were to happen?

It is clearly a problem that the media enjoys to dramatize with massive wars and heroes saving the world. According to the Drake equation estimates, there is such a small chance of this happening, however, it is a potential future problem that would not be solved by one country and would require the world to work together. First, the signal of some form would be picked up on the SETI telescope, which Rees mentioned is funded entirely by private funding. This telescope would pick up signals and let those on earth that there was complex life on the horizon. Then people would most likely be told to stay put in their homes. This would not be a problem in some countries, however, in the US, mandatory quarantines have proven to be an issue for some. This also brings us back to the recurring idea of inequality around the globe in this course. Some would have access to shelter and food to hide, while world leaders implemented a plan. In the meantime, others would not have this as an option. It could lead to a greater global problem. Eventually, something would be put into place but it would take a global effort, not that of a specific country or as the movies prefer, a lone hero. This is an issue that is of very small likely-hood, but if it were to take place, would be of highest importance on a global level.

Source: "On The Future" by Martin Rees Source: https://www.space.com/40435-finding-aliens-humanity-reaction.html Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-what-humans-might-do-if-there-were-an-alien-invasion-2018-05-09 Image Source: https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/yoga-wellness/apocalypse-survival-training-fitness-app

[smichel11]

movie

I watched the movie Snowpiercer for the first time with a couple of friends and had no idea what to expect--all we knew was Chris Evans was in it and the director of Parasite made it--so we assumed there would be some element of social commentary, especially since it was a suggested movie for this class. Right from the get-go, there are questions about the dangers of advancing technology irresponsibly, as the world has frozen over because of some invention put in the air intended to cool down the planet to work against the adverse effects of Climate Change--but it was perhaps a little too effective at cooling down the planet because humans cannot last more than a few seconds without freezing to death. Now, the only humans left live on a train run by famed inventor, Willard, and they are separated into different train cars based on socio-economic status. Open on Chris Evan's character who lives in the back of the train, covered in dirt and surrounded by darkness--his people are suffering. And so, he plans a revolution to get to the front of the train, with the aims of taking control--and the movie follows them on this journey.

Now, I do not want to spoil what happens in the movie, because it is really good and everyone should watch it. This film highlighted many key issues: inequality being at the top of the list, asking questions about how do we set priorities and treat people decently when we face the end of the world, as well as the limits we should place on advancement and how to regulate a society. If all the world lives on a train, how do we make sure it runs? Is life still worth living if the way in which we live corrupts and infringes on the rights of so many?

The ending of the movie is shocking, powerful, but also uncertain. This is incredibly like our future--no one really knows where we are headed or what to do really. I think what this movie is trying to suggest is how can we be responsible when approaching the future? Responsible to ourselves, to our communities, and others? We need to be careful when making these decisions about advancing society and tackling doom--the future of humanity rests on it. Who do we want to be?

[Junker24]

Framing

While reading Buckle up: We are in for a bumpy ride. An interview with Royal Astronomer Martin Rees, I wanted to comment on something that is becoming ever so dangerous in our world today that Martin Rees discusses. Rees talks about how Earths population has reached almost 8 Billion, doubling in size over the past 50 years. With this exponential growth, comes fears of what happens if we grow to quickly, something that is evident in many parts of the world today. With doing a bit more research I found that there are over 240 Million people in Africa going hungry every day, out of the 1.2 Billion inhabitants of Africa. That is nearly 25% of the total population of Africa starving. This immense growth of the population of the world has left many groups of people out of the necessary resources to survive as well as stripping the last natural resources we have in these parts of the world. With the ever growing population of Africa, more people will be left without the proper resources to survive, resulting from more overpopulation that will continue to grow in our world. I personally think overpopulation is a huge issue in our world today, having negative side effects that could result in many other catastrophes. For Example, if our world were to double in population in the next 50 years again, this would would exponentially increase the amount of food we would require to keep these humans alive, as well as increase the amount of electricity required to sustain this population, as well as increase the risk of spread of deadly viruses. All three of these current situations are problems that we are discussing today, and with an increasing population, we as humans will have to work together in order to combat these dangers as they becoming more evident. These issues that i have brought to light in the fear of Overpopulation, could cause detrimental effects to all of the world if they are not combatted. One of the solutions to overpopulation is government control, which China has enacted with their "One Child Policy" Although this is a drastic stance on Overpopulation, many countries may have to adopt this policy in order to be able to maintain their security as a country against these problems that will arise to overpopulation. I do not see the United States ever doing this, but i feel as though the United States will eventually take a stance on this is issue and combat the troubles that will arise due to Overpopulation. The world population grew from 1 Billion in 1800 to almost 8 Billion in 2021.

[TimGranzow7]

Future #Risks #Solutions #Framing

Martin Rees’ book On the Future: Prospects for Humanity is essentially an all-encompassing, scientifically-backed prophecy describing the fate of humanity in the years, decades, and centuries to come. It deals with every major topic we have discussed thus far in this class, and fleshes them out in new ways by providing further evidence, compelling examples, and interesting perspectives that might not be often considered when discussing existential threats facing humanity. The first two chapters deal with the major threats, both physical and abstract, that we are currently facing. These include familiar fears such as nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, cyber warfare, and AI, but also some that are more complex and controversial, like ethically-questionable advances in biotechnology and theoretical physics. These numerous sections boil down to the larger point that “‘Space-Ship Earth’ is hurtling through the void. Its passengers are anxious and fractious. Their life support system is vulnerable to disruption and breakdowns” (226). Rees paints our world as on a collision course with something, but what that something could be is anybody’s guess. As such, he does not assert any one issue should be the focus of humanity’s efforts to survive, since addressing that threat would make us vulnerable to others. He cites climate change as one of the most complex, as dealing with it requires numerous innovations, collaborations, and some elements of luck (climate sensitivity, for example). However it also demands great sacrifice, concession, and universal acceptance of its realities. One particularly compelling example I had not previously considered was the claim that even if geoengineering could enable the spreading of reflective aerosols through the upper atmosphere, the fact that one country or motivated individual could feasibly do this themself — inflicting their will globally — is enough of a worry to hinder development for years to come. The many confounding factors like this that Rees describes highlight a major aspect of his argument: We need to invest in science and we need to do it now. The only way to realistically address all of these issues (any one of which could escalate to a point of no return) is to encourage research and development in all fields. Genetics to promote sustainable food sources and extend lifetimes; social work and population dynamics to deal with the increase in population toward a potential “carrying capacity”; biotech to ensure our longer lives are not spent in longer periods of senility or suffering; astrophysics and engineering to stop massive asteroids from colliding with Earth and rendering our work for longer lives futile, and so on. All threats taken together, the future of humanity appears incredibly grim. Rees shows however that this is avoidable if steps are taken now to encourage education, innovation, and cooperation. The means exist to make a scientist out of everyone on Earth, but humanity must first relinquish its greatest burden and existential threat: self-interest. The fortunate nations have a responsibility to support the less fortunate. Unless we all progress together, the planet as a whole stands still.

[EmaanMohsin]

risk #salience

"Elon Musk (born in 1971) of SpaceX says he wants to die on Mars— but not on impact. But don’t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. And here I disagree strongly with Musk and with my late Cambridge colleague Stephen Hawking, who enthuse about rapid build- up of large- scale Martian communities. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems." [1]

I strongly agree with Martin Rees's negative outlook on trying to shift humans to live on Mars. Not only does terraforming require technology not yet invented, but it also poses several ethical concerns. Additionally, Musk's optimistic outlook on a realistic transition to Martian colonies does a disservice to the public by creating a false perception that this lifestyle will be available to everyone.

The biggest challenge in terraforming Mars is to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This is important not only to increase the atmospheric pressure of the planet (which is currently 1% that of Earth) but also to increase the temperature [1]. The problem is that scientists have found that there is not enough CO2 on Mars (even hidden away in the polar ice caps) that can make a sufficient impact on the pressure and temperature. Some have proposed to build giant mirrors on Mars to reflect the sunlight, raise the temperature, and eventually release some CO2 from the ice caps. Others have called for harnessing ammonia-rich asteroids at hurling them towards Mars. Clearly, the technology to accomplish these feats has not yet been invented. Elon Musk however, has proposed a novel solution: launch nuclear bombs at the ice caps to begin to release more CO2. However, not only does this "solution" have the ability to destroy the planet, but it has also made the Russian space chief suspicious about the potential for countries to deploy bombs in space.

We should also consider just how ethical terraforming really is. Philosopher Robert Sparrow, in 1999, argued, "terraforming demonstrates at least two serious defects of moral character: an aesthetic insensitivity and the sin of hubris … to change whole planets to suit our ends is arrogant vandalism" [3]. Although there may not be intelligent life on Mars, we would be colonizing and transforming a planet that may even contain simple life. Terraforming Mars would also set a dangerous precedent for the future of space colonization if we end up finding a planet that has complex life. Further, to use resources and labor to terraform a planet that is not yet habitable instead of increasing the longevity of life on Earth seems to downplay the life currently present on Earth.

Lastly, the narrative surrounding terraforming creates confusion and dangerous rhetoric on the plausibility of humans to move to Mars. Musk claims that he believes a million humans could live on Mars by 2060. Yet, this would cost around $500,000. Additionally, terraforming would not be complete or even started, so future generations would have to certainly invest money in terraforming for colonies already on Mars. Musk claims that prices will eventually become more affordable to live on Mars, yet he also states that his goal is not for everyone to move to Mars, but to create a colony interdependent from Earth. This narrative is dangerous since individuals on Earth may believe that the planet is not worth saving since colonies can go on Mars, but only the rich will be able to afford this safe haven.

[1] Rees, Martin. "On The Future." Princeton University Press. October 16, 2018.

[2] "Mars Terraforming Not Possible Using Present-Day Technology." NASA. July 30, 2018. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming

[3] York, Paul. "Ethics of Terraforming." Philosophy Now. 2002. https://philosophynow.org/issues/38/The_Ethics_of_Terraforming#:~:text=227%2D236)%20argues%20that%20terraforming,ways%3A%20firstly%2C%20by%20destroying%20beauty

[c-krantz]

risk #policy #solutions

In reading Martin Rees’ On the Future, I found myself stuck in between finding hope and being frightened by human creations and capabilities. Regardless of holding an optimistic or pessimistic view on this, it is for certain that the future is dependent on us to not only build a better tomorrow, but to ensure that reliable citizens are positioned in roles that can guide society to handle these innovations responsibly. For better or worse, most of our discussion in this course has revolved around the existential threats that scare us the most and have thus left the class with the cynical conclusion that we are undoubtedly doomed (as seen by the response at the end of every Thursday class session). While I think that these conversations have been fascinating and incredibly informative, I do also believe that they have for the most part failed to touch upon the more optimistic components of the future that Rees does a fantastic job of doing. As Rees constantly points out throughout his book, there are many threats that should concern us, yet many of these threats are capable of being muted if human innovation decides to prioritize the future over the present. This begs the question whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic for our future.

With that said, another component of Rees’ writing that I found fascinating was his view on the future as it pertains to our collective actions as a society today. Rees writes that “key decisions shouldn’t be made just by scientists; they matter to us all and should be the outcome of wide public debate”. Much of the fear that consumes society regarding potential epidemics is unfortunately often dismissed because it is deemed uncontrollable, yet this should not be the case. As expressed in On the Future, many of the concerns and unknowns about Earth’s future are being questioned and researched for plausible solutions. It is our responsibility to vet these possible solutions as a society and find the best ones. If we just sit in fear, no progress will be made.

Yes, we very well may be doomed, but at the very least we have some capabilities already established and some close in the horizon that make this still a question and not yet a certainty. To summarize this belief, Rees writes “Although we live under the shadow of unfamiliar and potentially catastrophic hazards, there seems to be no scientific impediment to achieving a sustainable and secure world." With this said, it is reasonable to assume that Rees himself is optimistic about the future despite its many unknowns. The only way to protect society from an epidemic of great magnitude is to prepare for one, and through the scientific research and development that Rees describes, I believe we will eventually get to such a point. In that sense, I too find myself optimistic about the future.

[scicerom]

Framing

Note: I seem to wax poetic every time I write one of these, lately Sorry about that. In the novel Jurassic Park, where two characters discuss the fractal nature of things in our universe; things from far away often look very similar from close-up. The book applies the concept to successions of events in time, as well (in the book's case regarding dinosaur behavior being difficult to restrain from its natural course). In chapter four of On the Future, Rees asks the reader to consider the vast timescales waiting for the future of humanity. Not a mere lifetime, but potentially hundreds of millions of lifetimes until the sun’s demise. The book notes that humanity will almost certainly appear different by that time; either completely extinct or so altered/evolved that it will be virtually unrecognizable. And yet the idea of the fractal nature of events, both in terms of repetition and in terms of varying scale, remain at play for this theoretical humanity of the future. Humanity cannot close pandora’s box when it comes to the power it wields. We often discuss “getting off the rock”: the idea of making humanity interstellar as a method of self-preservation. And yet in that analysis we seem to assume that the general power of humanity will not increase proportionally to that geographic expansion, where it has gone far faster than it for all of the recent past. More concisely, we have no good reason other than simple idealism to believe that humanity will ever reach a point of utopian safety from doomsday scenarios. (As a side note, the book Utopia by Thomas Moore talks about a likely entirely fictional society; not even the original Utopia, then, could stand the test of time.) I remember a day in 11th grade. I was talking with some friends and my history teacher in a corner of a computer lab. The conversation drifted to worries regarding some aspect of current events and as per the usual for such discussions, I began to zone out. But in a minute or so, it finally struck my soul that the universe as it matters to us relies entirely on the efforts of real people, people you could reach out and touch, all trying to support the weight of the good things. If people just took it easy, everything would break. We can never really take it easy, as a group. I don’t think I’m usually a dramatic person, but I cried that day, to the utter bewilderment of all the people around me. Things on a small scale look like things on a large scale. Life has always had to work to survive. So humanity always had to work to survive. So the humanity of a thousand years from now will still have work to do if it wants to survive. I don’t believe any change in humanity could possibly change this fact, no matter how post-human we might want to be. I don’t believe the question of this class will ever be a resounding “yes”. That said, things on the small scale look like things on the large scale. And life’s made it a couple billion years so far.

[blakekushner]

movie #ai #irobot #future

Many movies covering potential existential threats such as a robot revolution, climate disasters, or nuclear war focus heavily on the threat itself or of good vs evil. In the movie iRobot these threats are addressed as well as a more psychological, existential threat: what it means to be human. To begin with a quick synopsis, the movie follows Detective Spooner as he investigates the death of a top scientist and soon finds that the main ai operating system, VIKI, is staging a robot revolution. This movie focuses on a certain type of ai that is much flashier and more suited for movies—human-like robots that want to takeover (kind of like the terminator movies). It ignores the other facets of this ai challenge like with smart algorithms or machine learning which may not be inherent threats themself but may lead to the worsening of the other challenges like climate, nuclear, or information chaos. Even though the technology in the movie seems very futuristic it does pose a good question in how we would define ourselves when confronted with technology that can do much the same that we can as humans. At one point in the movie Spooner is questioning Sonny (one of the robots) because he does not believe that Sonny could have any human characteristics. He asks if a robot can write a symphony or create a beautiful masterpiece, and Sonny replies “Can you?”. This exchange is very important because it shows that if we define humans by their ability and creativity not even all humans would count because I know that I cannot write a symphony or create a beautiful masterpiece so does that make me not a human? Additionally now, about 17 years later, there actually are ai that do create art (https://www.artaigallery.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw7pKFBhDUARIsAFUoMDYjz_RDdJierIoeJa0cJJU-YbWIIUBtdslkjQTrlAwqbtk4QGxI8lsaAg0ZEALw_wcB). Not only does ai pose an existential threat to humans in the ways that are shown in the movie with a robot uprising or machine learning and algorithms that can influence human psychology leading to even worsening other crises (like climate, nuclear, information chaos, fake news), but it also leads to an existential crisis in the way that we define ourselves as human– we would either have to integrate super-intelligent ai like those in this movie into society or redefine what it is that actually makes us human.

[jatkins21]

In Rachel Bronson's interview with Sir Martin Rees, he states that he defines himself as a technical optimist but a political pessimist - a stance that I find extremely accurate in our day and age. Rees acknowledges that while we presumably have the technical capacity to ostensibly resolve many of the looming existential threats on the globe, the political systems in place almost entirely inhibit this positive change from occurring. While political systems worldwide are often corrupt, the Bronson and Rees also find some understanding as to why politicians aren't addressing these looming issues. Politicians, even when not technically corrupt, generally aim to reflect the will of the people. Oftentimes, the priorities in this sense revolve around focusing on the short term, making changes that immediately curry favor and increase odds of reelection. Many people and many politicians place heavy emphasis on instant gratification, thus the people's will - and subsequently the politicians actions - often overlook existential, long term threats. Bronson and Rees noted that, during the Manhattan Project (which obviously aimed to address the existential nuclear threat) scientists worked to engage and inform not only the politicians that could push their agenda forward, but also the general public. They recognized that the support of the general public could transfer to the actions of politicians, and thus approached the presentation of The Manhattan Project in a very multifaceted manner. Rees even introduced a strong analogy to reflect the responsibility of scientists to lead the defense against existential threats, stating "You may not have very much control over the behavior of your teenage kids, but you are a poor parent if you don’t care. Likewise a scientist who doesn’t care about the use to which their ideas—their creations—are put is a poor scientist." This analogy strikes me as incredibly apt, as the general public may not necessarily understand or agree with the notions well-informed scientists present, but it is those scientists duty regardless to at least offer up the requisite information. Rees' reasoning for why politicians rarely address existential threats struck me as very logical. First and foremost, many political positions last for a short period of time, and politicians generally aim to create a positive (according to voters) impact within this time span. Were politicians to invest more in long term moves, those benefits would also not be immediate and may leave voters feeling as if that candidate hadn't accomplished much. Another point I also agreed with was the fact that many voters might see preparation for looming, perhaps inevitable threats as a waste of time or money despite the fact that it essentially serves as insurance or prevention for devastating events. This ultimately boils down to the mindset of the average citizen and how it impacts the actions of politicians, so in this sense it is more so the average citizens responsibility to desire these changes rather than politicians to enact them against the will of the masses. With this issue in mind, I would recommend/like to see if political systems could play around with perhaps instituting different lengths of office for various roles, whether in the same department or different. Obviously this exists to an extent, but even looking at American politics, most roles are relatively short. Theoretically, say some senate terms were the standard four years, but others were longer - perhaps ten years. This could allow those with longer terms to focus on acting towards longer term goals, rather than every senator maximizing short term payoffs in the hopes of reelection.

[a-bosko]

climate #salience #solutions

In the book On the Future by Martin Rees, the author makes many very interesting and important arguments about the future prospects for humanity and understanding what life on Earth will be like in the upcoming years.

In class, we often talk about climate change and how the societal view of climate change can impact the way we approach the issue. In On the Future, the author mentions that “effective campaigns need to be associated with a memorable logo.” The author highlights the image of a polar bear clinging onto a melting ice floe, mentioning that this iconic image has been a motivator for individuals in society to take action against global warming. Funnily enough, after searching “images of climate change” on Google, the first few images to come up are indeed photos of a malnourished polar bear on melting ice.

Even with these shocking and depressing images of starved animals, why aren’t we, as a society, pushing back harder against climate change and global warming? According to the article “One simple reason we aren’t acting faster on climate change?” by Diego Arguedas Ortiz, society avoids prioritizing climate action due to the “inherent image problem”. This dilemma arises from the need for an individual to see a tangible issue. Since gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are colorless and the impacts are slow-paced, it is hard for people to feel a sense of urgency to act now. With the current increase of wildfires, flooding, and heat waves, more people might start to realize how big of an issue climate change actually is and start a wave of action.

Another issue that Arguedas mentions in his article is that people tend to empathize more with images that show real faces, rather than inanimate objects or animals. The sad truth is that people tend to care about issues if it is an immediate danger to them. Therefore, what is the solution to getting people to care about the ever-changing climate and atmosphere?

The solution might be to “humanize” the problem, which means framing climate change in a way that immediately impacts the individual and society as a whole. By highlighting the aftermath of some of the wildfires, droughts, and floods, we might be able to get an empathetic reaction from individuals in society and push for collective action against climate change. If we are able to create a societal shift, we might be able to slow down the impacts of climate change, save endangered species, and leave the Earth habitable for the next generations to come.

The attached photograph is a part of a photo series called “Drowning World” by Gideon Mendel that highlights the real effects of climate change, demonstrating the possible consequences of climate change now and in the future.

Works Cited:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181115-why-climate-change-photography-needs-a-new-look

https://www.demilked.com/drowning-world-portraits-climate-change-gideon-mendel/

[Samcorey1234]

Solutions

Martin Rees’ On The Future is a cautiously optimistic book. The author, ever the scientist, especially having been the president of the Royal Society, believes that science and technology, when used with caution and ethically-minded humans, needs to carry us out of existential threats, including climate change, nuclear annihilation, and global pandemics. Technology, he believes, has already brought many people into improved lives; the problem merely has to do with sharing resources. As has been said: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Rees indulges this line of thinking with a passage on page 72, where he lists Robert Boyle’s centuries old technological predictions for the future, which would come to improve the world for humanity. Many of these predictions, it appears, came true. In part, they include: “The Prolongation of Life”; “The art of flying”; “The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed”; “A perpetual Light”; and “Freedom from Necessity of much Sleeping exemplify’d by the Operations of Tea and what happens in Mad-Men and stimulants to keep you awake.”

Indeed, much of the world for humans has improved, including elongating lifespans, improving quality of life, maintaining fewer incidents of violence, gaining higher education levels and producing higher quantities of food. The problem is one of distribution.

In America, there’s an interesting idea to carry this concept forward in a way that could protect citizens from a myriad of issues. Recently, journalist Matthew Iglesias published One Billion Americans, a book promoting the idea of opening immigration up significantly to allow for more people to fill our rural, suburban, and urban areas. Leaving aside the political viability, the idea is most fervent on helping America develop technologically, and improve decaying neighborhoods and towns that are being left behind. By allowing millions more people to immigrate to the country, Iglesias believes there will be more innovation and prosperity as more people will bring and develop better ideas together to create the science of the future. This is particularly meant to improve our defense against climate change. More people working to create alternatives to a fossil fuel economy, with patents and training stemming from America, the author believes, will only benefit the country.

Although I used to believe that everyone needed to simply pare down their consumption — buying less, flying less, and the like — I no longer believe that’s enough to combat climate change. Nobody will follow that logic because, for the most part, it’s not how status is accumulated in the 21st century. Instead, I believe Iglesias is right that we need more Americans to help create clean energy alternatives to fossil fuel products and to help bring millions of people out of poverty. (Incidentally, this will also protect many climate refugees from catastrophe.)

We need more people to leverage scientific innovation and create a brighter, more stable future for more people. Creating a country with one billion Americans is one way to fulfill that dream.

[apolissky]

In Martin Rees’s On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, there is no shortage to the number of threats that humanity faces, whether it be cybersecurity, climate change, nuclear threats, biohacking and biodiversity. Yet all of these threats, with the notable exception of climate change, seem to be solvable with the appropriate policy and careful technological development. In Rees’s conclusion, he explains that many of the societal challenges we face boild down to make wise choices about the future, admitting that often these wise choices came from science. Yet in the very same paragraph, Rees identifies that the decisions should not just be made by scientists. This leads to an interesting disconnect: we need specialized knowledge to make decisions yet if we gave power to just those with specialized knowledge we would no longer be an operational democracy. Rees seems to believe that we can remedy this issue by simply changing public attitudes towards science. He claims that much like we can appreciate music without knowing how to compose or play music, and thus likewise there should be a way to get an intuitive feel for science without having to actually practice it. But I think this is a misnomer and overshadows the true problem we face as a society. The reason we cannot appreciate or intuit our way about science without knowing details is precisely because science consists solely of details. Many relationships and ideas we discover in science we discover through rigorous questioning precisely because they combat our intuitive ideas about how the world should work. It seems impossible to expect that the general public will be able to understand the decisions that we need to make about our future as a society. Rees also notes that the younger generation is more concerned with the future and the sustainability of decisions we make today. I think this indicative of the real problem, the myopic view that our particular form of capitalism incentivizes. Particularly, people reach the point of power and decision making no longer have as much a stake in the future, and thus choose to act in short term benefit.

[madisonchoi]

risk #framing

Erik Brynjolfsson, the director of M.I.T.’s Initiative on the Digital Economy recently claimed, “The choice isn’t between automation and non-automation…It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.” With the increasing automation of jobs, millions of low-skill white-collar workers will undoubtedly face unemployment in the next coming decades. In his book On the Future, Martin Rees explores the existential threats that humanity faces moving into the future, such as how artificial intelligence will affect our job markets and lives. In the section Humanity’s Future on Earth, Rees has a chapter called “What About Our Jobs?”. He explains that the landscape of our lifestyles, social networks, entertainment, and jobs are changing at such a rapid pace due to developments in artificial intelligence. For example, truck drivers will be replaced by autonomous vehicles, registers in stores will be replaced by kiosks, and fast-food restaurants will be operated by automated drive-throughs. Transportation and shipping will become more efficient for large corporations that implement these technologies, and companies will undoubtedly become more economically prosperous, as they will have significantly reduced expenditures through the labor of machines. This brings up the issue of how this will exacerbate the existing wealth gap. Not only will top CEOs become wealthier, but people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds may not necessarily have immediate access to these technologies, making the positive aspects of technology predominantly benefit the wealthy as opposed to all of society. As Rees also points out, the digital revolution will generate enormous wealth for the top percent of innovators and global companies because they will prosper from cutting out the cost of millions of low-skilled workers. Rees argues that in order to preserve the healthiness and wellbeing of society, we would need to consider redistributing wealth or potentially even providing a universal income. However, on the other hand, I think it is worth noting that automation may end up fostering a global economy in which there is high demand for the professions that machines simply cannot replace. For example, machines will likely never replace the profession of a therapist, poet, psychologist, personal caregiver etc.—jobs that fundamentally require human empathy. On this topic, Rees argues that the wealthy will likely want personal service and the attention of a real human caregiver as opposed to an automated one, which would create a market for these types of jobs. He also talks about the “resurgence of arts and crafts” that may occur as an opposite effect to a highly digitized world. Lastly, he points out that an important benefit to social media and the speed of the internet is that it enables people from all around the world to have exposure to all sorts of other cultures in the world. For example, video calls enable immigrants to remain in touch with the culture of their homeland. Ultimately, the rapid development of technology like artificial intelligence proves to be a double-edged sword. While automation will bring greater efficiency and productivity for the economy by replacing low-skilled labor, this will also displace a huge portion of the labor force and allow large corporations to accumulate greater wealth, increasing the gap of inequality between rich and poor. On the other hand, technology like social media and video chatting allows people to gain greater exposure, knowledge, and perhaps even empathy towards different people and cultures in various places around the world. It is crucial that we keep these pros and cons in mind as we move forward into an even more digitized world.

Sources: https://ide.mit.edu/

[madisonchoi]

movie

Blade Runner, a movie directed by Ridley Scott, is loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Blade Runner is a particularly relevant film for considering how technology will shape human identity, our global community, and the environment in coming years. The movie offers a social commentary about the increasing lack of empathy and intimate human connections as technology becomes inextricably linked with our existence. It makes us question what fundamentally makes humans human. In the movie, global nuclear warfare has forced nearly all of mankind to flee to Mars, leaving society on earth to deteriorate into a radioactive dystopian mess. Corporations have created perfect human simulacra called “replicants” that are outwardly perfectly realistic and who were supposed to serve as slave laborers to humans. Eldon Tyrell who owns Tyrell Corporation has now advanced his technology to build android humans that are so sophisticated that they are behaviorally and visually indiscernible from real humans. However, replicants became outlawed because of several instances of rebelling against and attacking humans. “Blade runners” are tasked with the job of killing “replicants”— androids that are perfect simulacrum of humans, originally programmed to be slaves for humanity. Four of these replicants have now escaped to earth and are surreptitiously living among the people. To prevent public panic, the government has tasked blade runners like Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) with the duty of “retiring” or killing these replicants. The only way for Deckard to distinguish humans from replicants is by administering a Voight-Kampff test, a series of questions that prompts the subject to exhibit empathy and emotional responses, or not. A replicant should not be able to the pass the test after 10-20 questions. One replicant named Rachael takes over double the number of questions that it would normally take to determine whether she was a human or android because she was programmed to have human memories and emotions. As Deckard continues to hunt down the other remaining replicants, it becomes clear that they may have developed some amount of emotion and consciousness on their own. The line between authentic and artificial life becomes blurred, and the reader is propelled to reconsider what it is that really makes humans so human. The movie brings into question the cohesiveness and connectedness of our community as we face simultaneous ecological crisis, as earth is a dystopian apocalyptic mess with a large part of the population off planet, and widespread mechanization. There are a lot of things we can learn from Blade Runner as we move into a future likely filled with AI, robots, and greater technology. Many people face the existential fear that the “revolt of the robots” will come true. Martin Rees validates these concerns in On the Future, claiming that we don’t actually know where the boundary is between science fiction and what will become a reality for humanity to face (pg. 105-106). I think this also ties back to one of the previous weeks when we looked at Stuart Russell’s work. Russell argued that we should program AI with the goal of maximizing human preferences and benefits such that human and robot objective do not oppose one another. If we try to ensure the loyalty of AI to humans by programming them in this way, then perhaps we will never have to face the reality in Blade Runner in which the replicants revolt against their human creators.

[ghost]

solutions #framing

A line that has stuck with me from the readings this week comes from page 202 of Martin Rees’ book. He states, “Harnessing and implementing a scientific concept for practical goals can be a greater challenge than the initial discovery” (Rees 2018, p. 202). Over the course of this class, we have discussed both in the larger group session and in my discussion group possible solutions or partial solutions to the many existential crises that humanity faces. Whether it be the week we focused on AI, climate change, nuclear weapons, or pandemics, a constant theme was that scientific discovery and technology will play a large part in aiding humanity’s responses to these threats. I think the quote from Rees’ book beautifully demonstrates why a total reliance on technology or scientific discovery will ultimately be a disservice to humanity rather than an aid.

Scientific concepts can only take us halfway in solving the existential threats we have studied in this class. Humanity has to have the drive and the willingness to implement those concepts and to follow through on their implementation. The scientific discoveries are useless if the information is not used appropriately to solve the relevant problem. Though it will likely be immensely difficult, we cannot allow political calculations, private interests, or any other factor to obstruct the scientific solutions to problems. As many of us have said in the polls at the end of class, large-scale cultural transformations, and a society-wide reframing of how we think about these issues is needed. I would hope (though it may be considered naïve to do so) that if we are able to achieve those transformations then the implementation of scientific solutions would become easier for humanity to achieve.

The quote from Rees’ book also reminded me of a quote on signs that I have seen at climate marches and other protests, and I tracked it back to a tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson. It reads “every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored.” [1] After having watched a few disaster movies for this class, the claim seems to hold true. We must not allow this to come to pass – we have to listen to the scientists and implement the solutions they provide us with. If we do not, then I personally believe we stand little to no chance of avoiding any of the threats we have studied thus far.

[1] https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1254048358366416896?lang=en

[brettriegler]

[jane-uc21]

In chapter 2 of On the Future, Rees briefly discusses humanity’s impact on the biosphere via biotechnology. He points to instances in which we tried to eradicate species by genetic manipulation, specifically inducing sterility in mosquitoes carrying Dengue and Zika, and eradicating grey squirrels in the UK [1]. He also discusses microorganisms and viruses we have engineered, whether it be advertently (eg. engineering smallpox) or inadvertently (eg. antibiotic resistance due to frequent/incomplete use of antibiotics) [1].Rees presents these examples in the context of the dangers of biotechnology, but seems to have more concern for the threat of genetic engineering in raising ethical issues However, it is also worthwhile to delve into how anthropogenic interactions with microorganisms deepen  the concepts of the Anthropocene Era and “the globe” global warming, discussed by Kartha and Chakrabarty, respectively. Though technically encompassed in  “the globe” or “biosphere” that we discussed in weeks past, microorganisms- our impact on them and theirs on us- are largely overlooked in public discussions of climate change, biotechnology, and the regulation and policing thereof. This is likely because we cannot see and engage with microorganisms as we do with macroscopic life- even though there are estimated to be around 1 trillion species of microbes on earth!This ignorance causes us to overlook both threats and solutions. For example, microbe oxidation is a major sink for CH4, and will be essential as rice production is projected to double CH4 emissions by the end of this century, yet acidification and aridation of soil by acid rain and warming reduces soil microbial diversity. Looking at infectious microorganisms, warmer temperatures can substantially increase "efficiency" by reducing the latent period after infection [1], and altering vector migration patterns [2]. The dependence of infectious microorganisms on climate is further evidenced by close associations between El Nino and animal-borne diseases such as malaria, cholera, dengue fever, and Zika [2]. Microorganisms can also be powerful tools to mitigate these issues. For example, by manipulation of rumen microbiota we might breed lines of low-CH4 emitting cattle. In the vein of infectious diseases, non-infectious microorganisms might be used to combat infectious ones; eg., the symbiont bacterium Wolbachia was introduced to mosquito populations to reduce their capacity to carry Zika. If Rees’s feelings on the genetic manipulation of macro organisms are any indicator, he would likely oppose similar efforts to engineer the “microsphere.” Of course we cannot "science our way out of" making real sacrifices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming and its effects on macro and microscopic terrestrial and aquatic organisms, and we would have to thoroughly explore such micro engineering strategies before tinkering with the ecosystem. That being said, engineering the microsphere to mitigate negative anthropogenic effects might prove a less invasive strategy than the genetic engineering discussed by Rees. And in terms of human self-identification, further exploration of the microsphere will at the very least enhance our connectedness with our living globe (the picture is a biofilm on a glass bead- meant to look like earth!).

[1] Rees, Martin. 2018. On the Future: Prospects for Humanity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.[2] Cavicchioli, Ricardo, William J. Ripple, Kenneth N. Timmis, Farooq Azam, Lars R. Bakken, Matthew Baylis, Michael J. Behrenfeld, et al. 2019. “Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: Microorganisms and Climate Change.” Nature Reviews. Microbiology 17 (9): 569–86.[3] Robert Service. 2020. “From ‘Living’ Cement to Medicine-Delivering Biofilms, Biologists Remake the Material World.” Science (New York, N.Y.). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb3589.

[WinstonHartnett]

framing

What does it mean to have purpose? Well, that's a weird question to ask, but it's deeply related to why we do anything at all. I think that the worst existential threat, not necessarily in a moral sense (i.e. an unwilling catastrophe) but in its ability to eliminate the human race, is a lack of purpose.

Life is a game of chance. If a stable-enough environment exists (sustainable atmosphere, radiation-shielded land, liquid water, copious volatiles, ...), life will emerge given enough time. There have been many attempts to estimate the number of planets haboring life, most famously with the Drake equation: most intuitively conclude that we can't be alone. So, instead of talking about whether a specific threat might destroy humanity in the future, it might be more helpful to consider what kills other sentient alien life in the very long-term future?

We're conditioned, and quite helpfully so, that we are protagonists in life, on center stage. And if not oneself in some moments, we belong to a group with common purpose (think religions (or none), political tribes, clubs, companies, et al.). For many, this can mean deriving a sense of purpose from adversity from past trials and those yet to come: the frontiers of unexplored lands, the urge to rise above your origins, a drive for wealth and social recognition, continuing long traditions whose origins are long forgotten, or yearning for a simple life. Even today, I can feel excitement thinking of a new space race and solemn duty in the hardships we will face as a country with racial justice and economic inequality, as a globe with climate change and nuclear weapons. These things give us purpose.

Imagine, in the far future, a world where we finally discover a Theory of Everything complete in every way, maybe even a mathematical proof explaining existence---why the universe is the way it is. All the necessities of life are abundant and interpersonal conflicts are few. However, the Theory confirms that the universal speed limit restricts everything, including space travel, to the speed of light. We would be truly trapped, in terms of a human lifetime, to our very-near planets (Alpha Centauri is four [!] light years away). Our grandest undertakings would span millions of years. The vastness of space devours our hopes. Life is reduced to unceasing abundance without adversity or additional goals.

We are not protagonists in life or the universe, that much is obvious. Maybe it is that existence has fundamental limits not imposed by random chance or whether a given species is sentient, sapient, or otherwise, but that interstellar colonization is impossible. Other alien species, seeing this may instead choose to forgo space colonization and remain mostly planet-bound. WIth advancements in technology, it's feasible to simulate an effective universe for them to explore. Maybe they will choose to content themselves with "stories"---after all, there would be no effective difference between a simulation of a coffee cup according to the laws of physics and a real coffee cup. Slowly, imperceptibly, the species will fade away, giving rise to new inhabtants that take their place in a few hundred million years, or having rendered their planet incapable of further life.

This thought-experiment obviously presupposes a few things: (1) we don't artificially modify our thought processes (which is unlikely), (2) we actually need grandiose designs to derive purpose (for many just helping one another is enough), or (3) that the laws of physics forbid FTL travel. But it is a frightening thought that our greatest existential threat, our future, is losing our purpose in a vast and uncaring universe.

A recreation of humanity realizing it has no more barriers to smash, thus destroying its raison d'être

[ChivLiu]

movie

Directed by Lana Wachowski, the Matrix was a movie that first came out in 1999. The film describes a future in which reality perceived by humans is actually the Matrix, a simulated reality created by sentient Machines in order to pacify and subdue the human population while their bodies' heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. Upon learning this, computer programmer "Neo" is drawn into a rebellion against the Machines. The film contains numerous references to the cyberpunk and hacker subcultures; philosophical and religious ideas. The core of the Matrix is not only imaging the future but rewinding the past. Matrix (thought) is the core of the Matrix. All human behaviors are nothing more than understanding the world and transforming the world, how to understand the world (world outlook), determine the trend of their behavior, and understand the nature, purpose, motivation, method, and result of the world. These are all done by our thoughts.

Since Kant (1724-1804), mankind has made it clear that man only has the way to perceive the world as a man, so it is impossible to be omniscient and omnipotent like "God". The so-called knowledge of the world is regulated by three innate modes: pure intuition (the innate stipulation of the way of perception), logical category (the innate stipulation that thinking processes the perceived objects into individual units), and pure reason (the ultimate pursuit of logic). Then Husserl proposed "Back to the matter itself!" in his Phenomenology. Human rationality once believed that the world is a collection of concepts, and objects are merely representations. For example, the concept that a goblet is a wine glass is shown in specific scenes. Therefore, what is important is the concept, not the phenomenon, but it ignores the premise of shaping the concept of wine glass-the most basic perceptual life experience of man is the stimulation of the taste buds of drinking, the sound of the collision of utensils, and the joy of drinking with friends. It's the passion that can't control the toasting and singing... They are all in the matter itself, not in the cold logic. Husserl’s student, Heidegger, the last great philosopher so far, pointed out in his "Being and Time": No one has made any choices in advance, and being thrown into this world may be fortunate or unfortunate. People have different wills, choices, and circumstances. The only thing that we are free and equal is that we all "exist". Everyone's existence is not at a certain node in the past or the future, but at the moment, the happiness of the moment, Sadness, contentment, jealousy, self-confidence, and fear are you, and you are the "survival field"... It is the human sensibility that inspires thoughts in the anxiety of "lost existence" and the satisfaction of "survival".

May you exist with love, gratitude, and not afraid of nothingness. This is the plotted trend of the Matrix Trilogy-the entire discussion of the philosophical civilization of mankind to the present. I think this movie is not about the struggle between humans and machines, but about the evolution and upgrading of machine civilization. Smith repeatedly said that everything has a beginning and an end. Human civilization has ended. It is now a machine civilization, and it is evolving. In the end, the creator asked the Prophet how long this kind of stable peace could last—referring to the upgraded new system, where the sun shines brightly in the movie—the Prophet replied that the longer the better. In fact, this is just the good wish of the prophet. Everyone who has installed the machine knows that there will be a period of very good performance after the system is reinstalled or upgraded. However, as time goes by, there will be more and more system bugs, and the speed of operation will increase. It is certain that the new system will eventually fall into problems. Of course, according to Smith, there is a beginning and an end, and machine civilization must have its end.

[bbroner]

A key idea from this weeks readings that has stuck with me is that the Anthropocene era is a pivotal moment for our planet. For thousands of years humans have modified their surroundings to make themselves better off. Going back to irrigation systems in Mesopotamia to burning coal to run trains in the early 19OOs brilliant ideas transformed humanity however the macro scale impacts of these advancements weren’t necessarily known. However, over the past decades humans have developed a better persecutive of what our great “technological leaps” have actually meant for the planet that we inhabit.

While doing research on how humans can engineer our society to stop causing the extinction of other species and instead start promoting a healthier planet that will enable humans to keep prospering for hundreds of thousands more years I found solutions that were actually much simpler than I was expecting.

One key problem we are facing is that massive amounts of global pollution that is caused by the “tragedy of the commons” if only a few people were pumping CO2 into our atmosphere it may not have caused existential crisis but the idea that our population will soon get to ten billion people and ideally each will be consuming and using solid amount of energy society cannot just expect everyone to be responsible. A good idea to this solution is using carbon credits or financial incentives to modify individuals' behavior. Unfortunately our population is reaching a point where individuals left to make decisions in their own interest that negatively effects the rest of the world could ruin our planet and therefore we need some financial incentives to prevent this catastrophe.

Similar to the air pollution that is occurring the sheer volume of plastics and trash in our oceans is killing food chains that humans absolutely rely on. The solution here will be to invent alternatives to plastic that air biodegradable and will not kill off our oceans.

Another key issue that is crucial is the need to find alternative clean energy sources and the ability to store said energy. Global spending on renewables has caught up to the global spending on traditional green house gas emitting sources. This is good news when it comes to finding an energy source for humanity that doesn’t slowly murder our planet.

While these solutions would do a lot to alleviate the stress we are placing on our planet here are a couple geo engineering ideas that would benefit humanity immensely.

Finding ways to limit the amount of sunlight that hits our planet would lower our temperature as has shown via volcanic eruptions in our planet’s history

Injecting iron into our ocean would absorb oceanic carbon dioxide, and sucking carbon dioxide out of the air is a technology currently being researched.

https://mgaformaspace.medium.com/how-geo-engineering-solutions-help-fight-environmental-problems-a5dcc8d4c1e7

[aj-wu]

I found Rees’s last two chapters, “Humanity in a Cosmic Perspective” and “The Limits and Future of Science,” fascinating for the ways in which, they suggest, we might not be doomed. (For the purpose of this post, I’m conceptualizing “our doom” quite narrowly to mean the human destruction of all intelligent life. So the scenarios are not necessarily optimistic.)

Scenario 1: Intelligent life exists on other planets According to Chapter 3, Earth’s ability to sustain life is probably either unique or extremely common. If intelligent life abounds throughout the universe, then that sounds like a win for intelligent life, although I’m not really sure how that helps us. If we can find one, then maybe we can move in once we’ve finished ravaging the Earth, or maybe if another civilization finds Earth after we’re gone, then they can restart life here. This reminds me of my favorite answer to the Fermi paradox: it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself.

Scenario 2: Intelligent, silicon-based life will survive human life If we are to believe that AI is the future of life, we must radically shift the way we define life. I think there are strong reasons to. Lots of the things we think are worthwhile and meaningful about human intelligence — social connections, creativity, forward thinking, self-consciousness, imagination, and communication, to name a few — we’re learning more and more that AI can do, too. I especially like the way Rees situates the development of AI within the broader trajectory of Darwinian evolution; intelligent design looks more like the seamless continuation of a natural process than the start of a process that is different in kind from what we’ve seen before. A post-apocalyptic legacy like that would be satisfying to me, at least.

Scenario 3: Heat death of the universe I guess this one is not so much a hypothetical scenario as an eventual inevitability. At some point — 6 billion years from now, by Rees’s count — our sun will burn up, engulfing the planets of our solar system, and the rest of the universe will go on expanding, cooling, and quieting. So in what sense does this definitive end of all things not constitute our doom? Well, it won’t be our fault, and I think there’s some significance to that.

[jrgill-coder]

solutions

How can we as a species guarantee a reasonably high quality of life for everyone, without massively cutting the population? My futuristic outlook on this question is that urbanization needs to massively accelerate, and people in countries like America need to stop living in energy-expensive suburban homes and stop driving energy-expensive cars. The average person in New York City consumes 28% of the electricity of your average American. The average person in San Francisco utilizes about 24% of the average American. This average energy consumption is on par with countries like Uruguay and Argentina and is about half of China’s, despite China’s mammoth population and continuing development. The best part about this is that people in cities like New York City and San Francisco have some of the highest quality of living in the world. These are housing markets that are typically quite high in demand (the pandemic has somewhat complicated this). One major problem with these cities is that they often do not build enough housing to allow their populations to grow much or to alleviate homelessness. Cities like San Francisco have massively regulated housed markets that prevent new housing from being built. This is a huge problem! These cities that have managed to successfully construct energy-efficient lifestyles have a moral obligation to expand access to that lifestyle. By not doing this, cities will spread out more and energy efficiency will be significantly hurt. Incentivizing people to move to highly efficient cities and ensuring the necessary housing and transportation infrastructure are built up to support these people are key challenges for the coming decades and centuries. The lifestyle of Americans in cities like Oklahoma City are not sustainable, and the way to maintain a high quality of life while massively cutting our emissions is to move Americans into dense cities. BUILD THE CUBE!!!!!

Statistics gathered from: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?end=2019&most_recent_value_desc=true&start=1960&view=chart https://www.statista.com/statistics/807951/average-monthly-electricity-usage-in-major-us-cities/

[LucLampietti]

salience #framing

If there’s any question at the forefront of this course, it is this: what can be done to motivate action around existential threats? Not what actions can be done, for as this course has shown us there are many existing technologies at the ready, and as Martin Rees shows us in “On The Future”, there are many imminent technologies being built to address these existential crises, albeit they may cause some too. As Rees succinctly puts it, “Harnessing and implementing a scientific concept for practical goals can be a greater challenge than the initial discovery” (2020). So rather, the question is how to motivate those who are indifferent to, skeptic of, or plainly inactive in the face of existential threat. For this week’s discussion post, I want to hone in on an element of this debate, one that Rees dedicates part of Chapter Four too: religion. In this subsection, “What about God?”, Rees essentially writes off debate about religion’s merits as unproductive squabbling between belief groups and atheists (or other belief groups) that threatens to push religious believers away from science and thus make the two mutually exclusive. Rees sums up this sentiment using a quip from Darwin: “I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe as he can” (195). However, while I agree with Rees and Darwin insofar as religion should not be attacked and pitted against science, I do believe that the majority of religious thought is antithetical to productive action against these existential threats. The reasons for this are not that religion inherently is unscientific. I believe the Islamic Golden Age and its vast array of mathematical and scientific achievements, discovered in the name of a further understanding of Allah, demonstrate that religion is not inherently unscientific, though some manifestations might be. Rather the reason is that religion undermines a person’s belief in their own god-like abilities. In a matter of two centuries, humanity has decimated species, acidified oceans, and reshaped swaths of whole continents beyond recognition. We are on the verge of creating artificial life. We are gods at this point and the consequences of our actions are bordering on planetary. Yet by positioning ourselves at the will and mercy of a higher power, humans are implicitly downsizing their own ability to enact change, whether that is the ability to impact negatively or positively. It reminds me a bit of a Louis CK skit in which he mocks humanity’s treatment of Earth by conjuring up a scenario in which God returns and is shocked at the state of things. At its crux, the skit boils down to humans making a slew of excuses for why they needed to do all the things that inadvertently destroyed the earth (e.g. oil drilling to make money to buy food), to which God responds, “Why the hell did you do that? I already gave you everything you needed. There’s food on the ground, everywhere!” Instead of envisioning humanity as a passive subject that is subservient to God’s will, I believe religion needs to adjust to posit humans as God’s arbiters over the Earth. In doing so, humans will be more likely to act as stewards of the Earth as opposed to mere inhabitants.

[blakekushner]

future #framing #salience

While reflecting on the many existential challenges we have covered these past few weeks and reading Sir Martin Rees’ book, it made me think about why it is so hard for people to mobilize around these threats. The cosmic perspective that Rees and countless other astronomers and cosmologists subscribe to is a daunting task because it is difficult to really comprehend the vastness of the universe and how small we are in the grand scheme of things. Rees talked about the three Copernican revolutions, and possible fourth, with the realization that we revolve around the sun, the existence of other planetary systems, the existence of other galaxies, and the possible existence of the multiverse. These revolutions are so important because it really demonstrates how humans refuse to believe that they would be so minuscule in the universe. Rees included Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot quote in which he essentially speaks about how our species takes our place in the universe for granted—waging wars, hating each other, causing environmental damage all for one little “fraction of a dot”. This quote underscores why it is so hard for most people to really take action against these potential species-ending threats because it is hard to imagine a world where we won’t be there, where humans won’t somehow prevail. Especially now with the advent of amazing new technologies and great steps in space travel these things make it harder to contemplate a potential world-ending disaster that would make Earth virtually unlivable, because maybe humanity can just move to Mars or some other planet, but astronomers have yet to find any other Earth-like planet, let alone a solar system similar to our own. Perhaps if more of the general public were able to adopt a more cosmic perspective, realizing how special and lucky we are to be on the perfect planet in a perfect solar system to sustain life, then maybe more work may be put in to ensure that our fortunate species gets to continue.

[chasedenholm]

exoplanets #solutions #thefuture

Martin Rees’ book “On the Future” provided great insight into advancements that we have witnessed, advancements coming soon, as well as possibilities of sustaining the human race by exploring potentially habitable exoplanets. Rees also introduced the transit technique in Chapter 3 when discussing humanity from a cosmic perspective. If we can’t escape an existential threat on our planet, how can we find a new habitat in our universe? When looking at actual exoplanets, there are a number of factors to consider to determine if they are habitable. The ability for a planet to harbor life results from a series of interactions between the planet itself, the star system, and its orbit. What this means is that for an exoplanet to be habitable, it first has to be determined that it exists in its star systems habitable zone. The habitable zone is that distance from a star that liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet. These zones are also known as Goldilocks’ zones, meaning that the conditions have to be perfect for life. However, planet habitability is planet and system-specific as bigger stars with bigger planets have adjusted distances in which liquid water could exist due to the difference in size and energy received. There is no universal decided habitable zone as it depends on the systems themselves.

In planets that have already been discovered, the most promising one to host human life right now is a planet orbiting a star called KOI 5715. However, this planet is not classified as an Earth-like planet, but instead a “super habitable planet”. There have been 24 “super habitable planets” discovered, but they are all over 100 light-years from our system. What makes these planets super habitable? Well for one, their star has a longer lifespan as they are either cooler G-type stars (the Sun is a G-type star) or they are K-type orange dwarf stars that have a life span of 20-70 billion years. In comparison, the Sun has a 10-billion-year life span with 5.4 billion left. When looking for super habitable planets, researchers are looking for a planet orbiting a K-type dwarf star, a 5–8-billion-year-old star, a planet 1.5 times bigger than Earth, a surface temperature that is 5 degrees Celsius higher than on Earth, moist atmosphere with about 30% oxygen levels, water distribution, a large moon, and a planet with plate tectonics or an alternative geochemical recycling mechanism as well as a geomagnetic field. As of right now, the best candidate to satisfy those conditions is a planet orbiting KOI 5715. That planet is 1.8 times bigger than the Earth, it is 5.5. billion years old and has an orbital period of 190 days. The downside being that KOI 5715 is 2,964 light-years away from our solar system, so we cannot rely on finding a super habitable planet because the ones that are out there are out of our reach. Instead of focusing on trying to escape our planet, we should work to sustain our planet and help heal it. Although solutions like exoplanets are certainly intriguing, they are not realistically attainable things for humanity right now and even in the near future. Instead of escaping the problems on Earth, we need to work towards solving them.

Sources: On the Future https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2020/10/07/is-earth-the-best-planet-in-the-galaxy-perhaps-not-say-scientists-hunting-superhabitable-worlds/?sh=7169e0036e3c Pictures: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+transit+technique&sxsrf=ALeKk02pUvfpthosbajprfJu6q69-vQAig:1621469841251&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjw5Jrv_dbwAhWTHM0KHU3MB40Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=827&bih=718

[blakemoss]

future #movie

(spoilers for Her ahead) In thinking about the future in the context of this class, I was drawn to the movie Her. In Her, Theodore Twombly is a lonely man whose job is to write loving letters for people who are unable or, as is more common, unwilling to write them to their loved ones. He downloads an AI operating system, Samantha, and she begins to develop in intelligence at a rapid pace. They develop feelings for each other throughout the film, but it becomes increasingly clear that their relationship is not exactly on equal footing. Theodore learns that Samantha is in relationships with thousands of other people, drawing into question the legitimacy of their relationship. As she develops in complexity and intelligence, Samantha is experiencing near infinite stretches of time between every word Theodore speaks due to the speed of her artificial mind. Eventually, this asymmetry grows until Samantha leaves the physical world along with the rest of the AIs, leaving Theodore heartbroken but changed for the better. I feel that Her is fairly unique in portraying a view of uncontrollable AI acceleration in a relatively positive light. In the world of the film, the AI aren’t malicious or terrifying, they’re just evolving past the limits of humanity. At least at the end of the film, they have no ambitions of destroying or conquering humanity-- they simply leave. Intuitively, it makes a lot of sense that AI rooted in human learning processes would become benevolent relative to human moral systems. Samantha has a few quotes throughout the movie discussing the way in which she’s evolving past humanity, but none of them seem aggressive. In one of these conversations, she characterizes her capacity for love: “[..] the heart’s not like a box that gets filled up. It expands in size the more you love. I'm different from you. This doesn't make me love you any less. It actually makes me love you more.” This seems like a really hopeful view of how AI could develop beyond human capability. The film’s portrayal of such a strangely optimistic future feels like one of the only compelling arguments that, perhaps, we aren’t doomed.

[cdrovetsky]

framing #solutions

The final chapter of Rees’ “On the Future: Prospects for Humanity,” discusses the role of scientists in society: in order to be able to find solutions for our impending existential crises, “scientists will need to engage with the wider public and use their expertise beneficially” (Rees). I think this is a very important topic for us to be discussing, as for me it seems to tie the class together. So far, no matter which weekly issue we have been reading about and discussing, one common thread they share is the role that science/technology could play in bringing about a solution, and the gap that currently stands between “science” and “the public.”

The interactions between the general public and science and technology have been crucial to essentially every week’s topic—from our class discussion about the Doomsday Clock, a symbol made with the intent of scientists being able to engage in existential conversations with the general public, climate change disbelievers, or even our most recent discussion on the role science played in handling the COVID-19 pandemic and how facts can become partisan.

Throughout the quarter, one idea that has kept popping up in my discussion section is how a two party system (that is quite polarized) makes discussions of “fact” difficult, as it almost seems that as soon as one side endorses a stance, be it factual or not, it becomes essential for the other to reject it. This poses the question of how to discuss science in such a context that is actually productive, especially when, as Rees points to, “science, optimally applied, could offer a bright future for the nine or ten billion people who will inhabit the Earth in 2050.” One major problem that Rees brings up is how disconnected the general public tends to feel from scientific discoveries: in order for productive discussion and debate around these topics, “we all need enough ‘feel’ for the key ideas of science, and enough numeracy to assess hazards, probabilities, and risks, so as not to be bamboozled by experts or credulous of populist sloganising.” I agree with Rees here and think one major area that needs improving is bettering the relationship and general trust people have with the science they see in the news. Improving access to actually comprehendible communication of scientific findings without unnecessarily confusing jargon is one concrete step that could be taken to help this. Rees also offers the solution to “give up more sovereignty to new global organizations along the lines of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, and so on.” If we can standardize the approach to discussing scientific issues in a non partisan way, this would increase trust in the bodies governing such discussion.

[atzavala]

risk

I was especially interested in Rees’ discussion about the future of the human species, and the very real possibility for non-human futures. He mentioned briefly the use of bionics being used to improve the lifespan and quality of life as the technology advances. He mentions throughout the book that developments in AI could make producing and distributing new technologies much easier and cheaper. Coupled with this idea of bionics and much more invasive technologies that can change the biology of humans like CRISPR, could it be possible that we are nearing a future where we are modifying ourselves into a different species completely. Of course it's easy to think of the extremes like in science fiction, cyborgs and heads in jars, or maybe even humans in the movie Gattaca who are genetically modified in the womb to be more intelligent, immune to diseases, and physically fit to excel in sports. But I think these changes will be much more subtle and actually seem like necessary medical treatment. Imagine a technology that could be attached to a heart to lengthen the life of heart attack patients or, as Rees mentioned in his book, an external memory storage for those with brain damage, but as the technologies advance and become cheaper to produce and distribute to patients there could be room for private start-ups to make a profit selling these to the public. CRISPR is a very real example of this. The increased accessibility to this technology has brought ‘designer babies’ into our reality. People who can afford it now have the ability to eliminate unwanted genes that are tied to diseases from their embryos during IVF treatments. The implications of this technology existing and possibly advancing into something that would bring us closer to a reality like Gattaca makes the future of us a little less ‘human’. Technology has been useful as extensions of ourselves, but in the next couple of hundred years it will be interesting to see how we continue to merge our lives with more advanced technologies like AI and genetic modification. How long before we look back to 2021 and don’t recognize ourselves as the same species? Will we be able to perceive reality differently? Maybe we’ll be able to develop technologies that allow us to see infrared light, or feel the Earth’s magnetic field. This topic feels very science fiction, but as we’ve learned from this class, as technology evolves the imagination becomes a reality and comes with very real-life consequences that can be threatening if not handled properly.

[BuffDawg]

framing #salience

This week’s reading by Professor Martin Rees provide some insights that I find hopeful but pessimistic at times. From the interview article on “The Future Prospects for Humanity”, he candidly informs us that humanity will likely not destroy civilization wholly in the next hundred years – which shows he is a bit more optimistic than many of my peers in this course. I think realistic assessment of the threats we are discussing is critical in order for us to be able to come together as a society/community and be able to rationally identify the most pressing threats that require not only economic support but public support. His emphasis on education and transparency I think is essential to our ability to cooperate to survive as a species. Because most humans exhibit traits that are generally irrational and impatient, our politicians are effectively forced to prioritize shortsighted agendas that do little to prepare us for life in 100 hundred years – and who can blame them? “…the main effects are decades in the future. Also, they’ll be worse in other parts of the world than they are in the UK, or Europe and America”. The issue of climate change simply cannot be ignored if we want to sustain life as we know it, but simultaneously we have to assume that individual nations will not move unless unilateral action is assured, lest they be at an economic disadvantage. Unfortunately, I don’t believe Sir Rees to be quite as realistic as this interview made me believe. In the Independent article, he tries to undermine the success of nuclear deterrence. I simply don’t understand how the fact that no nuclear weapons have been used at all since World War II isn’t a sign of resounding success. Though he calls it “Russian roulette”, it is not that simple at all. Russian roulette implies random chance, but we know that humans are just rational enough not to seal the world to destruction and death at the drop of the hat. Luckily, I believe we live in more sophisticated times where nuclear winters are unlikely to happen, we have sufficient time passed where nuclear wars were much more risky, and hopefully we as a human civilization can turn our concerns to the much more pertinent threat of climate change, which will render our society infertile if we don’t act soon.

[nobro011235]

solutions #framing

Throughout the interviews and the book from Lord Martin Rees, the sentiment that governments need to guide our society into the future gracefully and intelligently is expressed multiple times: “These longer term global issues are hard for politicians to prioritise over and above the urgent and immediate parochial issues which their constituents care about” (Rees, 2020). So, how do we change the political systems of the world to better protect ourselves from existential issues such as biowarfare, nuclear warfare, and climate change? Firstly, I think it is clear that we need change. We have an interconnected world in commerce, but not an interconnected world politically. Countries hinder each other by hiding technology and placing barriers on free trade. The solution here is forming a world government that can abolish territorial barriers and differences. This is a point, however, that I have belabored in previous memos and I don’t want to beat a dead horse. So what can we do on a national level before international cooperation becomes more possible? In this spirit, turning an eye to the rest of the world and treating global citizens as American citizens. After all, American economic colonialism is still alive and well, and citizens of the world should benefit from contribution to this colonial system beyond simply the financial gain. We can take an example of this from one of the most successful civilizations of all times – the Romans. We can achieve this by massively increasing aid to foreign countries, opening the gates on immigration (as we will soon need to due to falling birth rates), and removing tariffs. We need to hold our representatives accountable for the future – something our current electoral system does not allow for. The one exception to this in our government is the judicial branch, where lifetime terms ensure that representatives aren’t held to political pressures of the term-based system that come from donors and constituents that swing from issue to issue too quickly to affect change on any one issue. However, the lifetime term poses its own set of challenges. Namely, policy lags behind public sentiment due to the lack of turnover in the representatives. With lifetime terms, as long as representatives can’t change their views as fast as society can (which, as sociological and psychological research shows, they can’t), policy will always represent the ideal policy of the past, not the present. Thus, instead of a lifetime term – I propose a strict age limit and term limit. While this would hurt consistency in what our government looks like, it would enable legislators to act based on what they view as America’s best interests, instead of the actions that would get them elected again. So, we need a radical change in our political system to act with consequence towards these grave existential issues, and these changes should come in the form of limiting terms for legislators to increase the forward thinking of our government, applying pressure to our representatives to enhance “citizenry” benefits for global citizens, and applying a more global view towards our role in the world. These citizenry benefits could include various signs of elevated status such as access to health care technology, guarantees on food and water, and increased ease of immigration into the U.S.A.

[brycefarabaugh]

framing

Martin Rees’s “techno-optimism”— an optimistic outlook on the belief that technologies can help solve some of humanity’s biggest problems— is a welcome relief from the “doom and gloom” found in much of the existing existential risk literature and presents an alternative perspective on how scholars, activists, policymakers, and everyday people can address existential risks in the years to come.

Many people tend to view technological advancement with suspicion, presumably because it represents new and unfamiliar ways of doing things, but new technologies are neither “good” nor “bad”. For example, nuclear weapons are likely the most destructive and fearsome weapons ever created, but the process that enables their destructive potential (nuclear fission) can be harnessed for the generation of carbon-free energy that produces no greenhouse gas emissions and minimal amounts of nuclear waste. The key process that differentiates nuclear weapons from the even more devastating class of thermonuclear weapons— namely, nuclear fusion— may one day be harnessed to produce limitless clean energy. These examples illustrate a fundamental truth that Rees understands but others often forget: the costs or benefits provided by a certain technology is almost totally dependent on how humans use them.

Another reason for techno-optimism is laid out in chapter 2 of Rees’s book “On the Future: Prospects for Humanity”, namely that life has improved considerably over the last several hundred years, and while that pattern certainly isn’t guaranteed, much of that progress is likely due to the development of new technologies. For example, the number of people living in poverty continues to decrease, average lifespans continue to increase, and violence and conflict are decreasing according to some metrics (page 76). Many of these improvements can be attributed to advances in technology. For example, Rees cites the fact that the cost of sequencing the human genome has fallen significantly over the past 20 years: whereas the original project was an international effort that cost $3 billion, by 2018 that cost had fallen to less than $1000 (page 64). One can imagine the cost has dropped further still and that widespread adoption of such an advance in genome sequencing can make personalized medicine much more accessible for everyday people. While it’s true such advancements in biotechnology could lead to the development of deadly pathogens or engineered bioweapons, such an outcome isn’t preordained, suggesting limits or restrictions on such technologies should be considered rather than outright bans.

At the end of the day, techno-optimism arguably has an important role to play in how we conceptualize existential risks, and people would be wise to remember both the costs and the benefits of new technologies.

Below: nuclear fusion enables both thermonuclear weapons and the potential for limitless clean energy (image source)

[ishaanpatel2022]

risk #framing

In On the Future, by Martin Rees, the author helps his readers understand what pertinent issues will define the future of humanity. More specifically, Rees outlines how the future of humanity is bound to science and depends on how successfully our society utilizes technological advances to address future challenges.

In order to utilize such technology to deal with existential threats, scientific progress needs to continue. Take, for example, climate change: if the world is able to create a widely accessible renewable energy source with low emissions, we may be able to curb the global temperature increase. However, this would require scientific achievements that we have not yet attained. Therefore, in order to meet Rees’ creed of utilizing technology to combat existential threats, further scientific progress is essential. In the book, it seems that Rees’ believes that the ultimate issue surrounding scientific progress is not the rate of progress but their application: that is, Rees believes that wise application of advances in areas like biotechnology, cybertechnology, AI, etc. will help society overcome existential threats to humanity.

However, not everyone shares Rees’ point of view. Instead of being worried about the wise application of scientific advancements, many experts believe that one of the budding issues of our time is the slow-down in scientific progress: for example, in his book, Zero to One, renowned entrepreneur and VC mogul Peter Thiel argues that modern scientific progress is no longer “groundbreaking”, but, rather, makes “one too many” improvements to existing innovations. Based on Rees’ description of the technology that he believes will help humanity, it seems they would need to be classified as “groundbreaking”, but such innovations are becoming scarce (according to Thiel).

Thiel’s theory is not an anomaly in this space either, as a researchers Cowen and Southwood recently published a paper echoing his concerns. The two researchers conclude that there is wide array of evidence showing the rate of scientific progress has slowed drastically in recent years. Evidence of this can be seen in productivity growth, total factor production, patent measures, researcher productivity, etc. and is worrying claim when paired with Rees’ decree of science as the way to alleviate future threats. Moreover, the researchers are not optimistic about the future: as the trends in their study were understood, the decrease in scientific progress does seem to be ending any time soon. Another way of thinking about Cowen and Southwood’s study is that “ideas aren’t running out, but they are becoming more expensive to find”. All in all, it seems that research has been done that shows the boom in scientific progress that has been seen in the past century is slowing down for a variety of reasons and will not increase any time in the future. If Rees’ creed of relying on groundbreaking technological advances to assist with future existential threats is the optimal way forward, this slowdown in progress is worrying, and we as a society may need to turn to other solutions (like societal change or governmental policies).

Image Sources: Innovation and Scientific Progress, by Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood

Other Sources: https://www.aei.org/economics/if-the-rate-of-scientific-progress-is-slowing-america-must-step-up-its-game/ https://voxeu.org/article/ideas-aren-t-running-out-they-are-getting-more-expensive-find https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/ Innovation and Scientific Progress, by Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood Zero to One, by Peter Thiel

[ZeyangPan]

origin #risk

In the section of Humanity's Future on Earth from the book On the Future by Martin Rees, the author states that there is a possibility which an asteroid large enough to cause global devastation will hit the Earth and destroy Humanity in the future. As someone who is majoring in Astronomy, I wanted to find out what is the occurring chance of this devastation. Here is what I found out. In 2014, NASA published an image(image above) showing how many asteroids were landing on Earth from 1997 to 2013. The size of the filled circle indicates the impact energy in the unit of GJ. Bigger-filled circles represent larger impact energies. s. We can see clearly that the size of the impactor can be as small as a peanut or as big as a small town. Major impact events have significantly shaped Earth’s history, having been implicated in the formation of the Earth-Moon system, the evolutionary history of life, the origin of water on Earth, and several mass extinctions. For small impactors, they might not even able to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere and got destroyed before they had a chance to hit the surface of Earth. However, giant impactors, have the potential capability to cause mass distinction of the human being. Given the Sun will leave its main sequence 6 billion years later, humanity may extinct by a giant asteroid before the Sun turns into a red giant. According to Schlichting’s research in 2018[1], an impactor with a radius of about 70km is capable of ejecting all of the atmospheres into space. Moreover, the dust that got ejected by the impactor is going to remain in the air for years after the impact. Therefore, the rest of the people who did not get killed by the impactor directly is likely to die eventually due to the loss of atmosphere and no sunlight because of the dust.

On the other hand, I agree with the author that climate change is indeed a major threat of the future of humanity. One aspect of climate change is global warming. We know that global warming is a phenomenon due to the continuous accumulation of the greenhouse effect. The energy absorbed and emitted by the earth-atmosphere system is unbalanced, and energy is continuously accumulated in the earth-atmosphere system, which leads to a rise in temperature and global warming. I have learned from one of my courses that when the global temperature of Earth exceeds a certain threshold, , Earth is going to trigger the runaway greenhouse which leads to the evaporation of Earth oceans. At this point, models of the Earth’s future environment indicate that the stratosphere will contain increasing levels of water. The result is that, the world’s seawater will lose approximately 1.1 billion years from now on[2].

Sources:

1. C. E. Moyano-Cambero, J. M. Trigo-Rodr´ıguez, E. Pellicer, M. Mart´ınez-Jimenez, J. Llorca, N. Metres, and J. Sort, ´ “Chelyabinsk meteorite as a proxy for studying the properties of potentially hazardous asteroids and impact deflection strategies,” in Assessment and Mitigation of Asteroid Impact Hazards. Springer, 2017, pp. 219–241.
2. J. F. Kasting, “Runaway and moist greenhouse atmospheres and the evolution of earth and venus,” Icarus, vol. 74, no. 3, pp. 472–494, 1988.

[nataliamedina1202]

framing #salience #cryonics

On the Future Prospects for Humanity by Martin Rees is an influential book which details the hopes for humanity using technology the ‘right’ way, while also providing the many ways that we could possibly go wrong. In Chapter 2, Rees touches on a technology that I am particularly interested in: anti-aging and lifespan extension technology as a way to ‘cheat life’. The strong will to extend humans past natural life coupled with the millions of dollars being funneled into start ups for such causes begs the question: are we carefully examining the ethical and philosophical concerns of what it means for humanity to create and use these technological advancements?

On life-extension tech, Rees details his experience being interviewed by a group of ‘cryonic enthusiasts’ for a company called Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona. This company essentially freezes human bodies or heads and replaces their blood with liquid nitrogen, with the hope that one day their resurrection will be possible. To briefly detail Reed’s account of this, he explains that even if cryonics had potential for success, it wouldn’t be admirable. Corpses would be revived into a place they are strangers -- “refugees from the past” (82). They may be treated poorly, as thawed corpses will likely be a burden to the current generation.

I was fascinated by this concept of escaping death through cryo-technology. Doing some research on cryonics, I was astonished by the faith that select scientists and future cryonically-preserved people put into this technology. The individuals agree to be frozen at -196 degrees celsius in a facility where their corpses are cared for until the day they ‘resurrect’ (Hale). I read through Cryonics Institute’s website, one of the major companies using this tech (pictured below), and found that they charge only $28,000 for the preservation (Cryonics Institute). Alcor, another company, charges $200,000 for a full-body preservation (Hale). Going website-to-website looking at pricing feels eerily similar to searching for the best sale price on a pair of shoes, which raises serious concerns in me, specifically about the lack of ethical and philosophical considerations. I wonder, how can we reconcile ethics with technology? Is cryo-technology destroying the essence of what it is to be human? What would the saying ‘you only have one life’ mean if we knew we have forever? What racialized or classed consequences could this technology bring in the future? With so much debate on the ethics behind cryonics, I wonder if this technology is really crossing the line. There are important questions at stake about life, death, and what it means to be a human, and cryonics seems to ignore these concerns. With all this in mind, it is important to reflect on this fact: just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean we should do it.

To conclude, Rees's conception of life-extension technology coupled with my-and-others concerns behind it make me worry about the lack of ethical foresight provided with the creation of such technology.

Coombe, Doug. “Joe Kowalsky and Andy Zawacki with the cryogenic tanks where frozen bodies are stored” Found, Metro Times, . https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/mi-cryonics-inst-freezes-dead-for-reanimation/Content?oid=2203268 Accessed 19 May 2021.

Cryonics Institute. “Membership FAQ”, https://www.cryonics.org/membership/faq#:~:text=Is%20this%20included%20in%20the,Yearly%20Membership%20is%20higher%3A%20%2435%2C000. Accessed 19 May 2021.

Hale, Tom. “Almost 200 People are Cryopreserved in Arizona Waiting to Be ‘Resurrected’”, IFLS, 29 Apri 2021 https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/almost-200-people-are-cryopreserved-in-arizona-waiting-to-be-resurrected/

Rees, Martin. On the Future. Princeton & Oxford. Princeton University Press. 2018.

[nikereid]

risk #salience #policy

In his book On the Future, Martin Rees discusses the future of humanity through a scientific discussion on potential existential crises humans face in the next century. Humanity is at a critical point in history right now; the Earth is more vulnerable and susceptible to anthropogenic change than ever as a result of increasing technologies. The author labels this as the age of “anthropocene” in which we as humans now have “the power to change the biosphere in significant ways”. I like this idea of the age of human influence on Earth, I just hope the human influence proves to be a positive one and we are able to harness our technology so we can reverse the negative impact us humans have had so far. This is why it is so important for the human population to be properly informed and aligned on these globally-significant existential crises.

As Rees mentions in his book, there are amazing technologies on the cusp of creation so there is reason to be optimistic about the future of humanity and Earth. While I fully believe in the promise of future technology, I still emphasize the need for preventative action because as we see in the cases of most disasters (natural or anthropogenic) preparation and mitigation is almost always more effective than dealing with the effects of the problem afterwards. For this same reason I second Rees’s statement about how Elon Musk’s proposition of mass emigration to Mars is actually a dangerous delusion. Elon Musk is one of the most influential people in the world right now and, as seen with the rise and fall of cryptocurrencies this year, people react strongly to his opinions and ideas with many revering him as some sort of “god-like” figure. This is dangerous because the proposition to terraform Mars is very far-fetched and he can be potentially turning people away from the real solution which would be to tackle global climate change. I identify as a techno-optimist in the same way Rees does but with our current technology Musk’s proposition is more of a fantasy than a solution. We need Musk and other influential heads to help us unite the world’s understanding of existential crises in a way which enables us to work better together. This is the Drake equation which is used to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy. As you can see given all the constraints, life is very unlikely...