A few weeks ago there was a flurry of media interest about the recent rapid improvements in the field of robotics and autonomous machines, and the potential threat they may at some point pose to mankind.
The article reminded me of something Jared Diamond wrote in his book Collapse, how societies choose to survive, or fail, about collective psychology in the face of some perceived danger. He describes how people living downstream from a recently constructed Dam in a valley were interviewed about how concerned they were about the possibility of the dam wall breaking, and the valley being flooded. In a settlement quite far downstream from the dam, residents were moderately concerned about the danger, and openly discussed what they might do in an attempt to evacuate the area in the event of an emergency. Strangely, as the interviewers approached people living in settlements closer to the wall, they found that they seemed to be less concerned about it than those living further away. People living right beneath the wall, of course, seemed to be completely unconcerned (if we ignore statistically insignificant exceptions), and were apparently convinced that it was impossible that anything could ever go wrong, and that there was nothing to worry about. The possibility that concerned people living near the dam wall may already have moved away needs to be taken into account, but this strange phenomenon is otherwise clearly obvious.
Interestingly, property prices of such areas reflect what one would generally expect i.e. that they are far lower right next to the location of concern. A good example is that of the housing suburb of Melkbosstrand near the Koeberg nuclear power station near Cape Town, where the area itself is considered to be quite nice (probably because high quality housing needed to be provided for the mostly foreign contractors that originally built the plant), but the average property prices are far lower than those in similar suburban areas outside the immediate danger zone, where there’s a reasonable general expectation of a safe escape in the event of a serious emergency.
This highlights the commonly known, but sometimes very strange looking aspect of human nature – irrational optimism. The case with the dam wall demonstrates how it comes into play when people’s circumstances change for the worse: The closer we find ourselves to some unexpected apparent danger, the less likely we are to believe that the threat is real. This was also disturbingly demonstrated in the heartbreaking film The Pianist, where targeted people were often not able to convince themselves of the horrors that lay ahead, despite overwhelming evidence pointing to the obvious.
The news reports began (I think) with this New York Times article, and were quickly picked up, and rehashed by most of other mainstream media for about a week, and then quickly, seemed to disappear again.
I can’t help but wonder whether it’s this same optimism that collectively takes hold of the popular imagination when it comes to the problem of potentially dangerous new technology. Discussion about this goes right back to the early pioneers of computers and AI, and it’s become so embedded in pop culture over the years with works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator films, The Matrix, and countless others, that it seems people have become quite immune to any alarming developments that should probably set the alarm bells ringing. It seems we pop our heads out every now and again, after hearing something worrying, and then quickly retract them back into the apparent comforting safety of our shells.
We seem to have become accustomed to relegating news of such developments quickly into some entertainment rubbish dump of the mind, the place for things that should not be taken too seriously, possibly joining other suppressed fears as the stuff of possible future apocalyptic movies.
If you’re interested in looking into this in more depth, try reading Bill Joy’s prescient 2000 Wired article. It will soon be a decade since that was written, but the field has literally exploded with ‘progress’ since then; especially the last two years, after a long era of relative stagnation. For some reason, new developments now seems to be happening at a quicker pace than ever before, and I think the need for some serious, high level discussion about this is becoming very pressing, and should probably be taken as seriously as the matter of dealing with the dangers of nuclear weapons, and their proliferation.
If there is one positive side effect of the coming energy shortages which the world will likely soon have to deal with, (alongside less paper junk mail — see the Hirsch Report), it’s that it may soon be increasingly more difficult to power our complex societies at current levels as it has been in the past, and that funding for these projects may be a lot more difficult to come by under those circumstances. This could slow down developments, and perhaps give people a chance to think about these matters in a more lucid way.
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