Expanding on Nick Bostrom's metaphor for technological development — it's like drawing balls of various shades from an urn, and if you ever draw a pure black ball, the world ends...
Here's the thing, why is it not the case that an electric current through metal between two sheets of glass doesn't produce a nuclear level explosion? Well glass does happen naturally, you just have to melt sand and it happens. Metals are sometimes scattered around naturally. If that is what was required, the earth would have had random nuclear explosions going off for all its existence.
It feels as if most of the easy stuff, the low hanging fruit has been picked and there are no black balls there. Some grey, many off white, but that's about it. An individual cannot make a nuclear bomb in his basement and all the easy combinations of stuff you might do seem to have their immediate consequences mapped out by the known rules of physics. In other words, people ordering insane drinks with all types of wacky options from Starbucks baristas may be annoying and hasten the unionization efforts of the workforce, but they won't set off a megaton explosion.
This implies to me that if there is a black ball, it's stuck to a long line of other balls that would give us an idea what we are pulling at if we keep it up. This sort of happened with nuclear weapons. The USSR setoff its Tsar Bomba, 100 megatons, but sort of like making the world's biggest ball of yarn, once you do it you lose interest fast. The bomb was massive but also massively impractical and even if you could shrink it to be manageable to use a plane or missile, it really didn't give you anything that 3 or so 10 megaton bombs properly spaced apart couldn't give you.
I'm learning then towards Team Cowen on this one. A purely unexpected black ball is a bit like asking us to contemplate a 50 kg rock heading right for earth at 99.99% the speed of light that is 50 light years away and so black that no telescope could pick it up (you can scale that up if you want to imagine a solar system wide civilization to something like a modest black hole on a straight line to the sun). Yes it could ruin all our days, but since there's nothing one could do about it what is the point?
Like so many people you get fixated on one threat, and because you feel that can be dismissed you dismiss all threats, even ones that are fairly well-documented like artificial pandemics. To say nothing of all the threats we're unaware of. You say we'll have a long line of other balls that will warn us, but that didn't happen with social media, which has turned into (by some accounts) a pretty dark ball. If we didn't get any warning there, why should be get warning for pure black balls? What physical principle distinguishes the two?
This seems a bit stretched, like someone complaining in 1960 that rock and roll was ruining the kids. I don't think there's any evidence social media is anything like an extinction level innovation and it would actually be pretty hard to argue it's even a net negative.
In essence you'd have to argue against the Internet because, let's face it, the Internet is basically social media. Whether you're talking about self made blogs from the 1990's or AOL chatrooms, it's all variations of the same thing. Could you imagine an alternative history where the internet just never really happened much?
The one place that did that was HBO's Watchman series which ended up in a type of retro futurism (electric cars, easy space probes but no cell phones yet some people had pagers). Different? Yes but not clearly better.
Here's the thing, why is it not the case that an electric current through metal between two sheets of glass doesn't produce a nuclear level explosion? Well glass does happen naturally, you just have to melt sand and it happens. Metals are sometimes scattered around naturally. If that is what was required, the earth would have had random nuclear explosions going off for all its existence.
It feels as if most of the easy stuff, the low hanging fruit has been picked and there are no black balls there. Some grey, many off white, but that's about it. An individual cannot make a nuclear bomb in his basement and all the easy combinations of stuff you might do seem to have their immediate consequences mapped out by the known rules of physics. In other words, people ordering insane drinks with all types of wacky options from Starbucks baristas may be annoying and hasten the unionization efforts of the workforce, but they won't set off a megaton explosion.
This implies to me that if there is a black ball, it's stuck to a long line of other balls that would give us an idea what we are pulling at if we keep it up. This sort of happened with nuclear weapons. The USSR setoff its Tsar Bomba, 100 megatons, but sort of like making the world's biggest ball of yarn, once you do it you lose interest fast. The bomb was massive but also massively impractical and even if you could shrink it to be manageable to use a plane or missile, it really didn't give you anything that 3 or so 10 megaton bombs properly spaced apart couldn't give you.
I'm learning then towards Team Cowen on this one. A purely unexpected black ball is a bit like asking us to contemplate a 50 kg rock heading right for earth at 99.99% the speed of light that is 50 light years away and so black that no telescope could pick it up (you can scale that up if you want to imagine a solar system wide civilization to something like a modest black hole on a straight line to the sun). Yes it could ruin all our days, but since there's nothing one could do about it what is the point?
Like so many people you get fixated on one threat, and because you feel that can be dismissed you dismiss all threats, even ones that are fairly well-documented like artificial pandemics. To say nothing of all the threats we're unaware of. You say we'll have a long line of other balls that will warn us, but that didn't happen with social media, which has turned into (by some accounts) a pretty dark ball. If we didn't get any warning there, why should be get warning for pure black balls? What physical principle distinguishes the two?
This seems a bit stretched, like someone complaining in 1960 that rock and roll was ruining the kids. I don't think there's any evidence social media is anything like an extinction level innovation and it would actually be pretty hard to argue it's even a net negative.
In essence you'd have to argue against the Internet because, let's face it, the Internet is basically social media. Whether you're talking about self made blogs from the 1990's or AOL chatrooms, it's all variations of the same thing. Could you imagine an alternative history where the internet just never really happened much?
The one place that did that was HBO's Watchman series which ended up in a type of retro futurism (electric cars, easy space probes but no cell phones yet some people had pagers). Different? Yes but not clearly better.