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In his most recent paper “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction,” SAB member Jason G. Matheny approached the topic of human extinction from what is unfortunately a somewhat unusual angle. Jason examined the cost effectiveness of preventing humanity’s extinction due to a catastrophic asteroid impact.

Even with some rather pessimistic assumptions, his calculations showed a pretty convincing return on investment. For only about US$ 2.50 per life year saved, Matheny predicts that we could mitigate the risk of humanity being killed off by a large asteroid. Maybe it’s just me, but it sounds pretty compelling.

Matheny also made a very good point that we all should ponder when we consider how our charitable giving and taxes gets spent. “We take extraordinary measures to protect some endangered species from extinction. It might be reasonable to take extraordinary measures to protect humanity from the same.”

For more coverage on this important paper please see the October 2007 issue of Risk Analysis and a recent edition of Nature News.

I was engaged in a conversation the other day with someone about my new association with the Lifeboat Foundation and the opportunity that was presented to me to sit on one of the scientific advisory boards. Let me first point out that the person I was talking with is extremely intelligent, but has a lay person’s knowledge of scientific topics, and is generally unfamiliar with Singularity related concepts in particular.

I immediately realized the opportunity in associating with the organization, but still did some reasonable due diligence research before joining it. During the course of the conversation, I explained the goals of the Lifeboat Foundation. I also showed some of the current work that it is doing, and some of the people associated with it by randomly showing some of their biographies. However, when I presented leading biomedical gerontologist Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s biography, I was confronted with what was essentially an ad hominem argument regarding his trademark beard. I refer to this as an ad hominem argument because this person believed, without having previously seen or met Dr. de Grey, that his long beard was the sign of a large ego and that he was doing his cause a disservice by conveying a negative image to the public.

I do not personally know Dr. de Grey, nor do I know the reasons why he chooses to have a long beard. To me, the issue of his beard length has no bearing on the value of his work, and although I do not choose to wear a beard at the present time, I thrive on living in a world of diversity where one can do so. What I have gathered about Dr. de Grey is that he is a highly respected member of this community who has many important things to say. The situation was ironic because Dr. de Grey does research that relates to a medical condition affecting a member of this person’s family.

I know the point that the person I was speaking with was honestly felt, and that she believed Dr. de Grey could better serve his cause by changing his appearance. But unconscious bias is something that affects all of us to some degree, and it is a subtle, but insidious error in reasoning. Fifty years ago, in the United States, with a different person, this discussion might have been about the color of someone’s skin. Twenty-five years ago, it could have been about someone’s sexual orientation. It’s easy to see the errors in rational thinking of others looking in retrospect, but it’s much harder to find our own biases. I long to know what errors in thinking style and biases that I myself harbor now, and which will only be evident with a clearer perspective in the future. As such, I will continue to follow the Overcoming Bias web site to help me in my journey.

I believe that Dr. de Grey reaches an even larger audience by making them take a second look at him. If he had a more common appearance, my debate partner would not have noticed him, and would not have engaged me in a lengthy conversation about his work. If this helps get our message out, then I implore Dr. de Grey to grow his beard even longer!

I eventually resorted to an appeal to authority to plead my case regarding the Lifeboat Foundation by creating a list of some of the more prominent people associated with the Foundation, their professions, and academic credentials. At first I regretted doing this. I am a student of Bayesian reasoning (thanks to Eliezer Yudkowsky) who would like to master the art and I know perfectly well that a person’s title or degree can’t prove their ideas. Ideas must be judged on their own merit. However, in this particular discussion, it made sense to use the appeal. It wasn’t about an appeal to authority being a valid debating technique or not. It was about using the right tool to persuade one person to open their mind to a new idea.

I, for one, am no longer ashamed to have this tool in my bag of tricks, and will use it whenever I need to get one more person to consider a new idea, even for a brief moment.

In a recent conversation on our discussion list, Ben Goertzel, a rising star in artificial intelligence theory, expressed skepticism that we could keep a “modern large-scale capitalist representative democracy cum welfare state cum corporate oligopoly” going for much longer.

Indeed, our complex civilization currently does seem to be under a lot of stress.

Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member and best-selling author David Brin’s reply was quite interesting.

David writes:

* THE UNLIKELINESS OF A POSITIVE SUM SOCIETY

Today’s “modern large-scale capitalist representative democracy cum welfare state cum corporate oligopoly” works largely because the systems envisioned by John Locke and Adam Smith have burgeoned fantastically, producing synergies in highly nonlinear ways that another prominent social philosopher — Karl Marx — never imagined. Ways that neither Marx nor the ruling castes of prior cultures even could imagine.

Through processes of competitive creativity and reciprocal accountability, the game long ago stopped being zero-sum (I can only win if you lose) and became prodigiously positive-sum. (We all win, though I’d still like to win a little more than you.) (See Robert Wright’s excellent book “Non-Zero”.)

Yes, if you read over the previous paragraph, I sound a lot like some of the boosters of FIBM or Faith In Blind Markets… among whom you’ll find the very same neocons and conspiratorial kleptocrats who I accuse of ruining markets! Is that a contradiction?

Not at all. Just as soviet commissars recited egalitarian nostrums, while relentlessly quashing freedom in the USSR, many of our own right-wing lords mouth “pro-enterprise” lip service, while doing everything they can to cheat and foil competitive markets. To kill the golden goose that gave them everything.

The problem is that our recent, synergistic system has always had to push uphill against a perilous slope of human nature. The Enlightenment is just a couple of centuries old. Feudalism/tribalism had uncountable millennia longer to work a selfish, predatory logic into our genes, our brains. We are all descended from insatiable men, who found countless excuses for cheating, expropriating the labor of others, or preserving their power against challenges from below. Not even the wisest of us can guarantee we’d be immune from temptation to abuse power, if we had it.

Some, like George Washington, have set a pretty good example. They recognize these backsliding trends in themselves, and collaborate in the establishment of institutions, designed to let accountability flow. Others perform lip-service, then go on to display every dismal trait that Karl Marx attributed to shortsighted bourgeois “exploiters.”

Indeed, it seems that every generation must face this ongoing battle, between those who “get” what Washington and many others aimed for — the positive-sum game — and rationalizers who are driven by our primitive, zero-sum drives. A great deal is at stake, at a deeper level that mere laws and constitutions. Moreover, if the human behavior traits described by Karl Marx ever do come roaring back, to take hold in big ways, then so might some of the social scenarios that he described.

* SHOULD WE — SERIOUSLY — HAVE A FRESH LOOK AT OLD KARL MARX?

Do you, as an educated 21st Century man or woman, know very much about the controversy that transfixed western civilization for close to a century and a half? A furious argument, sparked by a couple of dense books, written by a strange little bearded man? Or do you shrug off Marx as an historical oddity? Perhaps a cousin of Groucho?

Were our ancestors — both those who followed Marx and those who opposed him — stupid to have found him interesting or to have fretted over the scenarios he foretold?

I often refer to Marx as the greatest of all science fiction authors, because — while his long-range forecasts nearly all failed, and some of his premises (like the labor theory of value) were pure fantasy — he nevertheless shed heaps of new light and focused the attention of millions upon many basics of both economics and human nature. As a story-spinner, Marx laid down some “if this goes on” thought-experiments that seemed vividly plausible to people of his time, and for a century afterwards. People who weren’t stupid. People who were, in fact, far more intimate with the consequences of social stratification than we have been, in the latest, pampered generation.

As virtually the inventor of the term “capitalism,” Marx ought to be studied (and criticized) by anyone who wants to understand our way of life.

What’s been forgotten, since the fall of communism, is that the USSR’s ‘experiment’ was never even remotely “Marxism.” And, hence, we cannot simply watch “The Hunt For Red October” and then shrug off the entire set of mental and historical challenges. By my own estimate, he was only 50% a deluded loon — a pretty good ratio, actually. (I cannot prove that I’m any better!) The other half was brilliant (ask any economist) and still a powerful caution. Moreover, anyone who claims to be a thinker about our civilization should be able to argue which half was which.

Marx’s forecasts seem to have failed not because they were off-base in extrapolating the trends of 19th Century bourgeois capitalism. He extrapolated fine. But what he never imagined was that human beings might intelligently perceive, and act to alter those selfsame powerful trends! While living amid the Anglo Saxon Enlightenment, Marx never grasped its potential for self-criticism, reconfiguration and generating positive-sum alternatives.

A potential for changing or outgrowing patterns that he (Marx) considered locked, in stone.

Far from the image portrayed by simplistic FIBM cultists, we did not escape Marx’s scenarios through laissez-faire indolence. In fact, his forecasts failed — ironically — because people read and studied Karl Marx.

* HUMAN NATURE ALWAYS CONSPIRES AGAINST ENLIGHTENMENT

This much is basic. We are all descended from rapacious, insatiable cheaters and (far worse) rationalizers. Every generation of aristocrats (by whatever surface definition you use, from soviet nomenklatura, theocrats, or royalty to top CEOs) will come up with marvelous excuses for why they should be allowed to go back to oligarchic rule-by-cabal and “guided allocation of resources” (GAR), instead of allowing open competition/cooperation to put their high status under threat. Indeed, those who most stridently tout faith in blind markets are often among the worst addicts of GAR.

In particular, it is the most natural thing in the world for capital owners and GAR-masters to behave in the way that Karl Marx modeled. His forecast path of an ever-narrowing oligarchy — followed ultimately by revolution — had solid historical grounding and seemed well on its way to playing out.

What prevented it from happening — and the phenomenon that would have boggled poor old KM — was for large numbers of western elites and commonfolk to weigh alternatives, to see these natural human failure modes, and to act intelligently against them. He certainly never envisioned a smart society that would extend bourgeois rights and social mobility to the underclasses. Nor that societies might set up institutions that would break entirely from his model, by keeping things open, dynamic, competitive, and reciprocally accountable, allowing the nonlinear fecundity of markets and science and democracy to do their positive-sum thing.

In his contempt for human reasoning ability (except for his own), Marx neglected to consider that smart men and women would actually read his books and decide to remodel society, so that his scenario would not happen. So that revolution, when it came, would be gradual, ongoing, moderate, lawful, and generally non-confiscatory, especially since the positive sum game lets the whole pie grow, while giving bigger slices to all.

In fact, I think the last ninety years may be partly modeled according to how societies responded to the Marxian meme. First, in 1917, came the outrageously stupid Soviet experiment, which simply replaced Czarist monsters with another clade of oppressors, that mouthed different sanctimonious slogans. Then the fascist response, which was a deadly counter-fever, fostered by even more-stupid European elites. Things were looking pretty bleak.

* THE ENLIGHTENMENT STRIKES BACK

Only then this amazing thing that happened — especially in America — where a subset of wealthy people, like FDR, actually read Marx, saw the potential pathway into spirals of crude capital formation, monopolization, oppression and revolution… and decided to do something about it, by reforming the whole scenario away! By following Henry Ford’s maxim and giving all classes a stake — which also meant ceding them a genuine share of power. A profoundly difficult thing for human beings to do,

Those elites who called FDR a “traitor to his class” were fools. The smart ones knew that he saved their class, and enabled them to enjoy wealth in a society that would be vastly more successful, vibrant, fun, fair, stable, safe and fantastically more interesting.

I believe we can now see the recent attempted putsch by a neocon-kleptocrat aristocratic cabal in broad but simple and on-target context. We now have a generation of wealthy elites who (for the most part) have never read Marx! Who haven’t a clue how chillingly plausible his scenarios might be, if enlightenment systems did not provide an alternative to revolution. And who blithely assume that they are in no danger, whatsoever, of those scenarios ever playing out.

Shortsightedly free from any thought or worry about the thing that fretted other aristocracies — revolution — they feel no compunction or deterrence from trying to do the old/boring thing… giving in to the ancient habit… using influence and power to gather MORE influence and power at the expense of regular people, all with the aim of diminishing the threat of competition from below. And all without extrapolating where it all might lead, if insatiability should run its course.

What we would call “cheating,” they rationalize as preserving and enhancing a natural social order. Rule by those best suited for the high calling of rulership. Those born to it. Or Platonic philosopher kings. Or believers in the right set of incantations.

* REVENGE OF THE DARKSIDE LORDS

Whatever the rationalizations, it boils down to the same old pyramid that failed the test of governance in nearly 100% of previous civilizations, always and invariably stifling creativity while guiding societies to delusion and ruin. Of course, it also means a return to zero-sum logic, zero-sum economics, zero-sum leadership thinking, a quashing of nonlinear synergies… the death of the Enlightenment.

Mind you! I am describing only a fraction of today’s aristocracy of wealth or corporate power. I know half a dozen billionaires, personally, and I’d wager none of them are in on this klepto-raid thing! They are all lively, energetic, modernistic, competitive and fizzing with enthusiasm for a progressive, dynamic civilization. A civilization that’s (after all) been very good to them.

They may not have read Marx (in this generation, who has?) But self-made guys like Bezos and Musk and Page etc share the basic values of an Enlightenment. One in which some child from a poor family may out-compete overprivileged children of the rich, by delivering better goods, innovations or services. And if that means their own privileged kids will also have to work hard and innovate? That’s fine by them! Terrific.

When the chips come down, these better billionaires may wind up on our side, weighing the balance and perceiving that their enlightened, long range self-interest lies with us. With the positive-sum society. Just the way FDR and his smart-elite friends did, in the 1930s… while the dumber half of the aristocracy muttered and fumed.

We can hope that the better-rich will make this choice, when the time comes. But till then, the goodguy (or, at least with-it) billionaires are distracted, busy doing cool things, while the more old-fashioned kind — our would-be lords — are clustering together in tight circles, obeying 4,000 years of ingrained instinct, whispering and pulling strings, appointing each other to directorships, awarding unearned golden parachutes, conniving for sweetheart deals, and meddling in national policy…

…doing the same boring thing that human beings will always do — what you and I would be tempted to do — whenever you mix un-curbed ego with unaccountable privilege, plus a deficit of brains.

Planning for the first Lifeboat Foundation conference has begun. This FREE conference will be held in Second Life to keep costs down and ensure that you won’t have to worry about missing work or school.

While an exact date has not yet been set, we intend to offer you an exciting line up of speakers on a day in the late spring or early summer of 2008.

Several members of Lifeboat’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) have already expressed interest in presenting. However, potential speakers need not be Lifeboat Foundation members.

If you’re interested in speaking, want to help, or you just want to learn more, please contact me at [email protected].

The inspiration of Help Hookup is actually a comic book called Global Frequency by Warren Ellis. My brother, Alvin Wang, took the idea to startup weekend and they launched the idea this past weekend for hooking up volunteers. It is similar to the concepts of David Brin’s “empowered citizens” and Glenn Reynolds “an army of Davids”. The concepts are compatible with the ideas and causes of the Lifeboat foundation.

Global Frequency was a network of 1,001 people that handled the jobs that the governments did not have the will to handle. I thought that it was a great idea and it would be more powerful with 1,000,001 people or 100,000,001 people. We would have to leave out the killing that was in the comic.

Typhoons, earthquakes, and improperly funded education could all be handled. If there is a disaster, doctors could volunteer. Airlines could provide tickets. Corporations could provide supples. Trucking companies could provide transportation. Etc. State a need, meet the need. No overhead. No waste.

The main site is here it is a way for volunteers to hookup

The helphookup blog is tracking the progress.

Social Software Society for Safety.

Is there any scarcity? Perhaps friendship, because it requires time, shared history, and attention, is the ultimate scarcity—but must it always be the case?

A thoroughgoing naturalist, I stipulate that the value of all objects supervenes on their natural properties—rational evaluation of them is constrained by the facts. If I choose one car instead if its identical copy, simply because one has been stamped with a “brand,” this is the very definition of irrationality—if the 2 objects are exactly the same—you must be indifferent or violate the axioms of decision theory/identity theory. If I used a Replicator Ray to duplicate the Hope Diamond—which would you choose—the original—based on its history (was stolen, traveled around the world, etc) or the duplicate—they are identical!!

What happens to the value of the original? It is worth ½ because now there are 2? I make a 3rd copy so now it is worth 1/3? Nonsense—value has nothing to do with scarcity—a piece of feces may be totally unique in shape, just like a snowflake—but it has no value. Intrinsic value of objects depends on their properties. Instrumental value depends on what they can be used for (converted to intrinsic value).

Now I switch the 2 Hope Diamonds—neither of us knows which is which—do you pout and refuse to take it?

Now I duplicate your parents. I’m going to kill one set of them—which do you save? The originals. You owe them a duty simply because of the authenticity of the past relationship—the history you share with them. This is the difference between subjects and objects.

In an October 5, 2007 article, (WSJ, also summer feature in 07 New Atlantis), Christine Rosen argues that “because friendship depends on mutual revelations that are concealed from the rest of the world, it can flourish only within the bounds of privacy; the idea of public friendship is an oxymoron.”

What then, does the arrival of the transparent society bode for friendship? With ubiquitous computing—devices built into our clothes, embedded in the environment, cameras linked to our retinal displays, recording and streaming everything to our digital backup, our “life log,”—what of friendship? Social networking software will be integrated into all interactions—your face recognition software will pull up the profile of anyone you meet, instantly searching keywords for common interests, friends, past lovers, etc. Video testimonial files will pop up—don’t date this guy! You will get an accomplishment “rating” for different areas—career, hobbies, etc. Edited montages of your greatest hits and misses will populate the net—spin control, reputation management—prestige brokering will be the function of “banks” of the future. Myspace and Facebook are nothing compared to what will come.

Rosen argues that Facebook and Myspace dilute the word “friend.” With such a quantity of “friends” we diminish the intensity and quality of relationships. We already rank “real world” friends unconsciously—Myspace makes it explicit with a top friends list. Rosen is aware that the social network sites create a new type of accountability—records of IMs, personal news feeds, etc mean that you can never claim to be unavailable—you will get caught in your white lie.

But the true potential of the transparent society lies in what I call “ruthless objectivity.” I’ve begun practicing this myself as a form of cognitive behavior therapy—confronting yourself on tape/video forces you to see how you interact with the world—allowing you to overcome negativity, if you can take the heat.

Within a decade, “omniveillance” and life logging may be the rule. Acknowledge your failings and insecurities and they no longer have power—except of course if they are things you can’t change. Thus the technological transhumanist imperative to overcome limitations—what is disease, but just such an unfair limitation?

Here is the key point for those of us involved with the lifeboat foundation. We can design defense systems forever but at the end of the day, the best we can do is minimize accidental harm. You will never stop 100% of people determined to go on a rampage or commit acts of terrorism. You can see this already with gun control. You’ll never build a gun smart enough not to be shot in anger/unless you undermine the technology itself. You can’t wait for the gun to authenticate in the heat of battle—unless I suppose it were hooked up to instant face recognition software (we could postulate scenarios all day!) When events like Columbine or the Virginia Tech shootings happened I am always shocked—not that they occurred, but that we have as few rampages each year as we do!!

Most of our social institutions (our factory education system) are set up to create winners and losers, artificial scarcity that breeds resentment, failure, exclusion, marginalization, and anger. No wonder people react unreasonably to an unreasonable world, it is only reasonable (in a twisted way). People are actually more resilient than given credit for.

The Federalist papers, written during the debate over the formation of the institutions of the US government, famously argue for a system of checks and balances, so that ambition will counter ambition, greed counter greed. We could expect reasoned debate and participatory democracy from a government of angels, but we have a government of men so we must assume the worst and design things accordingly. Every man is not a Socrates.

This design approach won’t work in the 21st century. You can only get so far assuming we are sociopaths. We are about to reverse engineer the brain. The mystery of empathy—how Ghandi, Mother Teresa, or Jesus managed to care for the unwashed masses—this will become apparent. Anyone that wants to be more moral can work at it just like going to the gym. The science of empathy is no more mysterious than that of muscle building.

Empathy enhancements, along with constant cognitive therapy thanks to total omniveillance can make us a much more tolerant and humane—and therefore SAFER—society. Of course, people will have to rethink the idea of privacy. My prediction is that once cheap surveillance technology arrives, the only stable endpoint is total recording of everything mundane and sensational. Privacy has no intrinsic value—it only derives instrumental value from the fact that people are evil and will use information to hurt one another. Futurists often seem to miss the essential point that 1$ spent on lessening the chances that somebody is going to be alienated can make us a lot safer in aggregate than $1 million spent on an elaborate technical solution. Not that these approaches are mutually exclusive—I argue that the only real hope for humanity is to re-write our neurological source code.

Facebook is still rather crude—it will give way to the next generation. We control the use to which our technology is put—it does not control us unless we allow it to. When the Virginia Tech “massacre” occurred, April 16, 2007, I scoffed at the memorial groups that sprung up—like an emotional echo chamber—thousands of people, quite distant from the actual events (not direct friends/family members) created pages and testimonials.

Another symptom of our ADD society—only 4 days before Don Imus had been fired over his “nappy headed hoes” remark—if the timing had been a bit different his scandal would have been forgotten before it got started.

My initial reaction was wrong—if these people want to “grieve” this way, perhaps it was of some comfort to the survivors and victims. It certainly doesn’t hurt anyone.

The Net is radically democratic and empowering. It isn’t one to many broadcasting, but many to many. I don’t like Blogs—who cares about your mundane life—what you had for dinner at some restaurant. I don’t want to start a regular blog because if I got a following I’d have to keep cultivating them—you’re only as good as your last post.

And yet I’m guilty of the same narcissism, uploading myself on youtube now, logging my bodybuilding photos for all to see. At least I try to be interesting—my pictures and slideshows, if ridiculous, are more entertaining than 50% of the material out there. As expected, I am starting to attract a gay following on youtube—at least they appreciate the male physique. There is a difference between blogging your life and sharing an area you’ve devoted 13 years to and achieved something in—ultimately I think that comes through.

As for relationships, today there are considerable limits to our empathy and attention—the latest studies show 5 “close” friends as average. The superlative “best” friend admits of only one, regardless of how many BFFs you may say you have. Polyamory (multiple person marriage) doesn’t work well with our current cognitive architecture, and love triangles are socially unstable despite what geometry might say (but at 60% divorce rate, regular marriage ain’t doing a lot better).

A God or superintelligence might have the cognitive capacity to attend and respond to every aspect of your being—multiplied by 6 billion, and truly be everyone’s best friend. Until then, we’ll have to be content to use our new social software to relate not alienate. You never know who’s watching.

Joseph

University of Pittsburgh researchers injected a therapy previously found to protect cells from radiation damage into the bone marrow of mice, then dosed them with some 950 roentgens of radiation — nearly twice the amount needed to kill a person in just five hours. Nine in 10 of the therapy-receiving mice survived, compared to 58 percent of the control group.

Between 30 and 330 days, there were no differences in survival rates between experiment and control group mice, indicating that systemic MnSOD-PL treatment was not harmful to survival.

The researchers will need to verify whether this treatment would work in humans.

This is part of the early development in the use of genetic modification to increase the biological defences (shields) of people against nuclear, biological and chemical threats. We may not be able to prevent all attacks, so we should improve our toughness and survivability. We should still try to stop the attacks and create the conditions for less attacks.

There are dozens of published existential risks; there are undoubtedly many more that Nick Bostrom did not think of in his paper on the subject. Ideally, the Lifeboat Foundation and other organizations would identify each of these risks and take action to combat them all, but this simply isn’t realistic. We have a finite budget and a finite number of man-hours to spend on the problem, and our resources aren’t even particularly large compared with other non-profit organizations. If Lifeboat or other organizations are going to take serious action against existential risk, we need to identify the areas where we can do the most good, even at the expense of ignoring other risks. Humans like to totally eliminate risks, but this is a cognitive bias; it does not correspond to the most effective strategy. In general, when assessing existential risks, there are a number of useful heuristics:

- Any risk which has become widely known, or an issue in contemporary politics, will probably be very hard to deal with. Thus, even if it is a legitimate risk, it may be worth putting on the back burner; there’s no point in spending millions of dollars for little gain.

- Any risk which is totally natural (could happen without human intervention), must be highly improbable, as we know we have been on this planet for a hundred thousand years without getting killed off. To estimate the probability of these risks, use Laplace’s Law of Succession.

- Risks which we cannot affect the probability of can be safely ignored. It does us little good to know that there is a 1% chance of doom next Thursday, if we can’t do anything about it.

Some specific risks which can be safely ignored:

- Particle accelerator accidents. We don’t yet know enough high-energy physics to say conclusively that a particle accelerator could never create a true vacuum, stable strangelet, or another universe-destroying particle. Luckily, we don’t have to; cosmic rays have been bombarding us for the past four billion years, with energies a million times higher than anything we can create in an accelerator. If it were possible to annihilate the planet with a high-energy particle collision, it would have happened already.

- The simulation gets shut down. The idea that “the universe is a simulation” is equally good at explaining every outcome- no matter what happens in the universe, you can concoct some reason why the simulators would engineer it. Which specific actions would make the universe safer from being shut down? We have no clue, and barring a revelation from On High, we have no way to find out. If we do try and take action to stop the universe from being shut down, it could just as easily make the risk worse.

- A long list of natural scenarios. To quote Nick Bostrom: “solar flares, supernovae, black hole explosions or mergers, gamma-ray bursts, galactic center outbursts, supervolcanos, loss of biodiversity, buildup of air pollution, gradual loss of human fertility, and various religious doomsday scenarios.” We can’t prevent most of these anyway, even if they were serious risks.

Some specific risks which should be given lower priority:

- Asteroid impact. This is a serious risk, but it still has a fairly low probability, on the order of one in 105 to 107 for something that would threaten the human species within the next century or so. Mitigation is also likely to be quite expensive compared to other risks.

- Global climate change. While this is fairly probable, the impact of it isn’t likely to be severe enough to qualify as an existential risk. The IPCC Fourth Assessement Report has concluded that it is “very likely” that there will be more heat waves and heavy rainfall events, while it is “likely” that there will be more droughts, hurricanes, and extreme high tides; these do not qualify as existential risks, or even anything particularly serious. We know from past temperature data that the Earth can warm by 6–9 C on a fairly short timescale, without causing a permanent collapse or even a mass extinction. Additionally, climate change has become a political problem, making it next to impossible to implement serious measures without a massive effort.

- Nuclear war is a special case, because although we can’t do much to prevent it, we can take action to prepare for it in case it does happen. We don’t even have to think about the best ways to prepare; there are already published, reviewed books detailing what can be done to seek safety in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. I firmly believe that every transhumanist organization should have a contingency plan in the event of nuclear war, economic depression, a conventional WWIII or another political disaster. This planet is too important to let it get blown up because the people saving it were “collateral damage”.

- Terrorism. It may be the bogeyman-of-the-decade, but terrorists are not going to deliberately destroy the Earth; terrorism is a political tool with political goals that require someone to be alive. While terrorists might do something stupid which results in an existential risk, “terrorism” isn’t a special case that we need to separately plan for; a virus, nanoreplicator or UFAI is just as deadly regardless of where it comes from.

Never underestimate the power of a “do-over.”

Video gamers know exactly what I’m talking about: the ability to face a challenge over and over again, in most cases with a “reset” of the environment to the initial conditions of the fight (or trap, or puzzle, etc.). With a consistent situation and setting, the player is able to experiment with different strategies. Typically, the player will find the approach that works, succeed, then move on to the next challenge; occasionally, the player will try different winning strategies in order to find the one with the best results, putting the player in a better position to meet the next obstacle.

Real life, of course, doesn’t have do-overs. But one of the fascinating results of the increasing sophistication of virtual world and game environments is their ability to serve as proxies for the real world, allowing users to practice tasks and ideas in a sufficiently realistic setting that the results provide useful real life lessons. This capability is based upon virtual worlds being interactive systems, where one’s actions have consequences; these consequences, in turn, require new choices. The utility of the virtual world as a rehearsal system is dependent upon the plausibility of the underlying model of reality, but even simplified systems can elicit new insights.

The classic example of this is Sim City (which I’ve written about at length before), but with the so-called “serious games” movement, we’re seeing the overlap of gaming and rehearsal become increasingly common.

The latest example is particularly interesting to me. The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction group has teamed up with the UK game design studio Playerthree to create the Flash-based “Stop Disasters” game. The goal of the game is to reduce the harmful results of catastrophic natural events — the disaster that gets stopped isn’t the event itself, but its impact on human life.

The game mechanisms are fairly straightforward. The player chooses what kind of disaster is to be faced (earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, wildfire or flood), then has a limited amount of time to prepare for the inevitable. The player can build new buildings, retrofit or demolish old ones, install appropriate defensive infrastructure (such as mangroves along tsunami-prone shorelines or firebreaks around water towers), institute preparedness training, install sirens and evacuation signs, and so forth — all with a limited budget, and with ancillary goals that must be met for success, such as building schools and hospitals for community development, or bringing in hotels for local economic support.

Once the money is spent (or the time runs out), the preordained disaster strikes, and the player gets to see whether his or her choices were the right ones. At the easy level, there’s generally enough money to protect the small map and limited population; at the harder levels, the player must make difficult choices about who and what to save. The overall complexity reminds me of the very first version of Sim City, but don’t take that as a criticism: the first Sim City arguably offered the clearest demonstration of urban complexity of the four versions, in large measure because of its spartan interface and simplicity.

Stop Disasters is billed as a children’s game, and it’s true that the folks at Architecture for Humanity aren’t going to use it for planning purposes. That’s not the goal, of course. This isn’t a rehearsal tool for the people who have to plan for disasters, but for the people who have to live with that planning — and those people who will choose to help their communities during large-scale emergencies.

I suspect that there would be an audience for a more complex version of Stop Disasters, one which puts more demands on the player to accommodate citizen needs. It’s a bit too easy to simply demolish old buildings rather than retrofit them in the UN/ISDR game, for example, and I would love to see more economic tools. I’d also like to see a wider array of disasters, beyond the short, sharp, shock events of quakes and storms. What would a Stop Disaster global warming scenario look like, for example — not trying to prevent climate change, but to deal with its consequences?

If we really want to get our hands dirty, we’d need to build up Stop Disasters scenarios for the advent of molecular manufacturing, self-aware artificial intelligence, global pandemic, peak oil and asteroid strikes.

Not because such games would tell us what we should do, but because they’d help us see how our choices could play out — and, more importantly, they’d remind us that our choices matter.