Name: Weapons and hope
ISBN: 9780060390310

What Hacker News says

dalkeOct 2014

But you can help it. What is your payoff matrix? How much effort do you think it's worth to prepare for every possible eventuality?

You'll notice that while flight crew give instructions on how to use various safety equipment, they don't actually run through drills where the masks comes down and they check to make sure they are put on correctly; they don't run through drills where the passengers actually leave the aircraft; they don't do all that while dumping simulated smoke in the cabins.

You'll notice that while there are tests of the evacuation alarms around, say, a nuclear power plant, they don't actually run mass tests to see if everyone can evacuate in time. New York City is in the 50-mile evacuation zone for Indian Point Energy Center. And those "plans" are more like "fantasy".

What you can do is read about disaster planning for those different scenario (hurricane, tsunami, nuclear reactor meltdown, bomb shelters, plastic sheeting & duct tape against biological attacks, fire drills, airplane evacuations, etc.), see what the plans are, and figure out why people came to the conclusions that they did. There's no reason to make wild guesses about what you think it should be when there's plenty of material for you to ground your thinking.

Regarding specifically nuclear bomb shelters, read Freeman Dyson's essay at http://scilib.narod.ru/Physics/Dyson/Weapons_and_Hope/Weapon... . For the US, a nuclear shelter program could destabilize the arms race, since we would be planning to defend ourselves against Soviet attacks, giving the Soviets cause to think that we would attack them knowing that we would be more likely to survive. The Swiss bomb shelters don't destablize international politics in anything like the same way.

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pdfernhoutJun 2024

(continuing my previous comment) The fact is, the weather has always caused issues. About 100 years ago in the US North East there was massing flooding and great loss of lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_(1... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_United_States_be...

California, for another example, seems to flip-flop between big droughts and massive floods every couple hundred years based on slight changes in atmospheric conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_California "Geologic evidence indicates that "megafloods" occurred in the California region in the following years A.D.: 212, 440, 603, 1029, c. 1300, 1418, 1605, and 1750. Prior to European settlement, these early floods predominantly affected the indigenous peoples of California."

(And of course then there are West Coast major earthquakes...)

Tens of thousand of years before all that, a mile or two of ice settled over the North East of North America among other other parts and the globe. Imagine the problems of living somewhere the snow stopped melting in summer and just piled up year after year for centuries. Our ancestors somehow made it through that. As well as later catastrophic flooding from breaking ice dams that might have raised sea levels by 10s of meters in a few days wiping out many coastal villages.

Then there were failed harvests from the Little Ice Age. And there was associated social dislocation from other climate change, like the apparent "Sea Peoples" who invaded Egypt and elsewhere.

Back to the present day, we've got all this tech to both reduce emissions (solar etc), and to ameliorate consequences (weather satellites, boats, railroads, 3D printed housing, insulation, LED lights, indoor agriculture, air conditioning, amazing materials, and so on).

As "nucrow" pointed out in a graph they linked to, the annual number of climate-related deaths from 1920-2021 from about 500,000 to about 10,000. Why? Presumably better weather forecasting and improved infrastructure are part of it.

But rather than optimism, some people are forgoing having kids because they are worried about climate change meaning there is no future for the human race. They are spiraling into dysfunctional despair.

I pointed to Reddit "CollapseSupport" previously to be kind because there is a genuine community there of people helping others deal with their fears, and anyone on HN who really is in despair over this climate change topic might find some help there (among other places).

But if you really want to see what ongoing doomsterism and despair looks like, "/r/collapse" is the companion to that other group: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/

I find it interesting and educational reading -- including about new things to worry about like post-Covid increased violence. There are many anecdotes there about personal despair and local despair. I have to agree many of them are things I share some concern about. The question is, in a world that has invented social media where people can see the worst stories from around the planet due to for-profit algorithms that promote engagement even if it is toxic to the user, do those selected anecdotes add up to an overwhelming trend?

I saw something similar as far as a zeitgeist of worry starting in the 1970s with Peak Oil fears that grew to a crescendo in the early 2000s (e.g. Michael Ruppert, perhaps contributing to his death), and fought against that despair somewhat then in various online discussions. But who really worries about peak oil now with EVs and cheap solar? Yes, it was good to be concerned about the transition, but humanity invented and deployed solutions (in part due to the concern). The USA always had hundred of years of coal supply -- but it would have caused a lot of ecological damage to use it.

In the 1800s, there was a despairing concern about Peak Whale Oil too, presumably, given declining Whale populations from all the harpooning. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/What-Can-We-Learn-From...

I saw another zeitgeist of fear in the 1980s with fear over nuclear war, especially coincidental with the movie "The Day After" and other previous things like the downing of Korean Airlines 007. Sadly, nuclear war is still a very realistic fear, even if such war is ironic, as I suggest in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." Odd that the media and most people seem to have mostly stopped worrying about nuclear war over the decades as a day-to-day worry, even though Russia is increasingly rattling the nuclear option a lot.

That is a much more likely apocalypse than climate change, especially since the lives of most US Americans are totally dependent minute-to-minute not so much on the US military's technical prowess as instead on probably-lowly-paid Russian service technicians probably using scrounged parts to maintain a 1970s-era "Dead Hand" computers (which the US tried to sabotage) so they don't launch nuclear missiles accidentally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand

I would expect that is the sort of issue that Freeman Dyson too might be more concerned about than rising CO2 levels (including as he wrote a peace-exploring book about the nuclear arms race called "Weapons and Hope"). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028642.Weapons_and_Hope "In this book, Professor Dyson explores how national decision-makers think about nuclear war, and how this isn't always well-considered or intelligent thought. He also applies the same criticisms to how leaders in various peace and disarmament movements think about nuclear war. The result's an unflinching assessment of how we think about actually using (or defending ourselves from) the world's still-massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons. (Vance Frickey, 2018)"

Of course, there are always other fears like (more?) engineered plagues. Here is a list of my technology-and-society related fears circa 1999: :-) https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm

In any case, as linked above at spiked-online, there is a plausible case that rising CO2 is a good thing. And as I previously linked to, it's quite possible that we have already passed the maximum level of atmospheric warming (although there still might be knock-on effects as systems that are reservoirs of "coolth" like the deep oceans continue to absorb heat until some equilibrium point). That means that any effort to reduce fossil fuel emissions and keep CO2 at current levels may be essentially wasted because it won't affect atmospheric warming and it also harms the greening of the planet and the blooming of deserts. So such money would be better spent on either mitigation or other socially beneficial projects (like, for example, eliminating malaria and/or easily curing it?).

In general, these are the sorts of systems effects that Freeman Dyson was concerned might be missing from the models or related policy. He presumably felt some things that should be better understood before making certain broad policy investments. For example, there is an argument that plants growing faster given more CO2 might be weaker or less nutritious (mentioned in part in the article), so another issue to be explored as a system effect.

Personally, I am all for replacing fossil fuels with decentralized renewables like solar and also energy efficiency including passive-solar homes (and maybe someday fusion power, perhaps even via local-scale "Back to the Future" "Mr. Fusion" household systems). Such innovations produce less local air pollution and water pollution than fossil fuels burning does which otherwise harms and even kills a lot of people via health issues (potentially costing in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually plus many lives as an externality of fossil fuel use). Smog and oil slicks are unpleasant to be around and cause a lot of environmental damage to other creatures (including mercury pollution from burning coal which makes many fish unfit to eat much of). Decentralized electrical power sources help shift political power in a more decentralized way too, which can potentially help shift the overly-hierarchical wealth-concentrated society we live in towards a better balance of meshwork/hierarchy (using Manuel De Landa's terms). Such decentralized power systems also tend to be more resilient, with longer time-scales of stand-alone operation, which makes them better to have around in times of most disasters or war. So, we should move away from fossil fuels for those sorts of reasons, not because of potentially-flawed-or-incomplete doomster academic models.

(A supervolcano eruption would definitely be bad for solar though, and we'd be better off with nukes or geothermal or fusion in such circumstances, or even desperately going back to burning fossil fuels for a few years until the air cleared.)

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pdfernhoutApr 2022

The "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" website has not seen fit to post yet a comment I made there a few days ago on "Russia may have used a killer robot in Ukraine. Now what?": https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russia-may-have-used-a-kille...

So I will put a copy of what I posted there here on HN, since it is relevant to the bigger picture of killer robots:

I've thought about how to mitigate the risks of (potentially self-replicating) autonomous military robots and other potential WMDs since the 1980s when I was a visitor at the CMU Robotics labs of Hans Moravec and Red Whittaker, and also from taking classes with Frank von Hippel, Steve Slaby, George Miller, Gerry O'Neill, and Jim Beniger at Princeton, and from hanging out a few times with Freeman Dyson at the IAS and also talking with Ted Taylor (who Freeman Dyson put me in touch with) -- as well as talking to many other people and reading widely on this and related issues (both non-fiction and also insightful fiction, like James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear). My thoughts on this are summarized in an essay I wrote in 2010 on my website "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism".

Essentially, political controls will likely ultimately fail in the long-term given that parties to the (unlikely-in-any-case) political agreements have big incentives to cheat as long as they view the world in zero-sum competitive terms. As Freeman Dyson has explained in his book "Weapons and Hope", as long as the capacity to build WMDs remains they will always be a potential issue regardless of what treaties exist. The capacity to build such things eventually will always exist in an advanced technosphere. Right now it is relatively easy to build bioweapons and drones, and much harder to build nukes (which potentially might get easier with new advances in physics and material science). Frankly, we are doomed if we depend on political treaties alone to deal with this. What might succeed is ultimately a change of heart to A Newer Way of Thinking (like Albert Einstein and others like Donald Pet have talked about). Such a change of heart will involve emphasizing mutual security, intrinsic security, and achieving abundance from all through wise use of advanced technology. It will be a cultural change that makes the biggest difference, where in the long-term various political agreements might at most just reflect a global change of heart and perspective.

On a practical basis, tools that reflect a newer way of collaborative thinking like Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (Jeff Conklin) and Convergent Facilitation (Miki Kashtan) may help groups a lot in thinking of better solutions that address the needs of everyone. Better Free and Open Source Intelligence tools widely deployed may also help everyone make better decisions and avoid disasters like Ukraine.

==== More Details

To that end of a change of heart and perspective towards a newer way of thinking, here are the main points from that essay:

Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?

Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?

Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?

These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...

Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...

There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.

We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") ... and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...

Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ...

--Paul Fernhout "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

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