Imagine you were drawing candy from a jar that you couldn’t see into.
Just randomly pulling out candy.
After a while, say 100 times, all of the candy you pulled out turned out to be the same two
flavors, the overwhelming majority being your favorite, the other so-so, but it is what
it is.
Still edible.
You might assume that the rest of the candy in the jar is going to be the same two kinds,
but you can’t know for sure.
You can’t just dump the candy out and take a look because the jar is rigged to a hydrogen
bomb, but that’s neither here nor there.
This is essentially how human technological development has progressed.
The vast majority of our technological innovations have been useful.
In other words they represent the majority flavor of candy from the jar, my own preference
being green apple or watermelon.
These technologies are a net good, you can invent a widget that everyone finds useful,
and barring individual accidents and widget casualties, most people find them inherently
useful and an aid to getting through life.
You could cite the screw driver, aspirin, toasters shaped like R2D2, paper, bottles,
and so on as examples.
The lesser flavor is represented by double edged sword developments, where there is a
net good, but also a major downside.
Here you could cite addictive medications, chainsaws, automobiles that are inherently
useful but come with a price tag of environmental problems and relatively frequent accidents
and so on.
And then there is the unknown piece of candy that you haven’t yet drawn out of the jar,
just by sheer chance.
This is the bad flavor, where the candy is intolerably flavored in a way so terrible
you’ve never tasted anything like it.
Think bitter poisonous mushroom flavored with a good dose of metallic taste and too much
chili pepper.
And no sweetener of any kind.
It might have looked good, a nice color, but that’s far as it goes.Few things in futurism
are as murky as this, the dangerous unknown black swan technology.
This is a technology that arises, that may initially seem useful, but carries with it
an unforeseen extinction event.
Nuclear energy almost met this bar.
It’s inherently useful for generating power, but at the same time it wasn’t developed
for that.
It was developed in the depths of World War II as a way to end the war.
This led to the status quo, a nuclear arms race, cold war, a thaw, and now back to the
cold war.
While nuclear weapons are not an extinction event per se, they are unbelievably damaging.
Yet there are remote peoples on this earth such as the uncontacted people on North Sentinel
Island that would have no clue a nuclear war was going on and earth’s major civilizations
devastated and snuffed out.
They’d just go about their day, continue to reproduce and live life, and probably not
live long enough to see any disruption or problems they could identify due to invisible
radioactive fallout.
Humanity would go on, if not technological civilization as it was.
There are some known risks here.
The idea that a malevolent and manipulative artificial superintelligence could arise is
perhaps chief among these.
Another are the unknown possibilities of molecular nanotechnology, more on that in a bit.
But in regards to extinction technologies, the really dangerous ones are the black swans
where something comes along, looks amazing, but has an unforeseen downside so great that
it could cause an extinction event not just for humans, but any alien civilization that
stumbles into such a technology trap.
There are actually two types of technology trap, one involves the loss of technology,
the other the development of technology with unforeseen consequences.
Either can constitute at least a reset of human civilization.In the loss of technology
trap, think of a solar flare that hits earth head on and knocks down the power grid.
This in itself is only physically dangerous to a human if you get caught in an elevator
or some accident occurs as a result of the solar flare.
But in itself, the flare won’t affect life on earth much and our not-so-friendly neighbors
on North Sentinel Island will again not even know it’s even happening.
But everyone else will in most of the rest of the world as the cell phones stop working,
the internet goes silent and the electricity goes away.
This is not immediately disastrous however, in that the first psychological reaction to
the loss of technology isn’t necessarily utter pandemonium, but frustration and boredom
as our technologically interconnected lives get disrupted.
The pandemonium comes later.
But the technology trap here however is how do you go back to a previous mode of existence
before our modern technology.
How many people in the developed world can subsistence farm, or even have a place to
try to do it?
The other is more dangerous, it’s the trap of an unforeseen future technology, or a technology
that is foreseen but not controlled.
AI is one example, but within the possibilities of nanotechnology and 3d printing are a number
of potentially dangerous technologies, any one of which could inadvertently spell the
end to whoever develops them.
An example here would be what’s termed as a nanofactory.
This is where nanotechnological assemblers can take raw materials and create essentially
anything the user wants.
This can range from food items and tools, but also viruses and nuclear bombs.
While much has been made of nanofactories as near instant printers of anything you want,
this is an error, nanotech on this level is going to generate a lot of heat and that will
limit just how fast it can create something.
But give it a plan and a few months, and then you might have something dangerous, particularly
so in that the means of production of a potential extinction event device moves to the individual.
What’s specifically alarming about this idea is that we’re heading in that direction
right now.
We’re already talking about technological unemployment as we watch the advent of very
capable computer programs that can do people’s jobs, probably better than a human ever could.
This has been around for a long while, however, robots have been assembling cars for decades.
But this effect is increasing exponentially, and as John Maynard Keynes put it a century
ago, humans are solving their economic problem once and for all.
He was a bit rosey in his assessment, seeing it as a positive, but it means the unemployment
of the human species and a total reordering of our economic systems, which is likely to
not be painless, and the transition of the means of production from the automated factory,
which can’t sell anything because everyone’s unemployed, to the individual where you 3d
print what you need in your living room.
So all of this creates a question, and a potential solution to the Fermi Paradox.
And a rather spooky one indeed.
Given the potential upheavals involved with predicted future technologies and their dangers,
what of the ones we haven’t predicted?
Within physics one thing we know is that we do not have a complete understanding of the
physical world.
There remains many mysteries, chief among these is the nature of gravity.
New physics can come at any time, it’s just a matter of spotting a discrepancy as it was
with Newtonian physics.
It predicted right most of the time, but tiny discrepancies were noticed which led Einstein
to formulate relativity which came with unforeseen but mind blowing implications such as time
dilation.
Nothing says that can’t happen again, and one year we’re sitting where we are today,
the next we have a more complete understanding of physics with a new theory, the missing
puzzle pieces between quantum mechanics and General Relativity might be a good place to
speculate about, that might offer technologies we currently have no comprehension of.
And for all we know, some of those technologies could be world ending.
So here’s the question, are the technologies the universe allows us to create common among
all technological alien civilizations, and if so, does one or a combination of advanced
technologies conspire to end all civilizations that attempt to develop them?
In a paper by Nick Bostrum, link in the description below, he posits that any number of technologies
may do this, ranging from military technologies and arms races to economic situations that
develop as a result of technology that causes collapses.
Known as the Vulnerable world hypothesis, interestingly it’s one of the few solutions
to the Fermi paradox that provides at least a groundwork on how to think about avoiding
catastrophe.
The first step he proposes is to make it a policy to assume that not all technologies
are going to benefit the species.
But this is scary in itself, because to keep your finger on the pulse of dangerous technologies,
especially when they get into the hands of the individual is going to require a lot of
intensive surveillance to ensure no one goes crazy with anything, and you’d need that
before the offending technology was even invented in order to avert disaster.
A tall order when dealing with unforeseen technologies.
I suspect the worst possible case in this scenario would be a long-shot, but the laws
of physics don’t prohibit it.
It’s the idea of running across some piece of advanced alien technology in the solar
system that might be far and away more advanced than anything we currently have.
If we can back engineer that technology, it may represent a black swan of technological
development, a leap so far that puts the nation state that found it far ahead of its competitors,
should they be able to figure out how that technology works.
Such a discovered technology would likely be subject to the utmost secrecy, which is
a problem, because a lack of openness means it’s more likely to be the subject of an
accident or covert development into a secret weapon.
Also, the more you limit access to something of scientific interest, the less chance you’ll
figure it out for lack of awareness by the best and brightest scientists.
Despite not being able to muster the full capability of the scientific community, naturally,
a government would want to keep such a discovery extremely secret, especially if they aren’t
sure how that technology works.
The reason is simple, if you ever could figure it out, you’re instantly ahead of your rivals.
But until you do that, it would be advantageous to keep it as secret as you possibly could.
Something to keep close to your chest, as it were that you might even keep secret for
many decades.
And it gets worse.
You could also envision an alien civilization that wishes to keep another in check.
It could be that the best way to manage the technological development of the civilizations
of the Milky Way is to wait until they are right at the cusp of developing technologies
that could be a threat to other civilizations, pepper them with even higher technology that
they can’t predict the downside of ahead of time, and then cause their reset by salting
those civilizations with technologies they aren’t ready for.
You could call this a vulnerability of a world to the intervention of alien technology they
will almost certainly try to back engineer and blow themselves up.
This is particularly of interest in there actually are human precedents for this that
Bostrum cites.
In human history, civilizations tended not to destroy themselves with their technologies,
but they did destroy other human civilizations that came into contact with them.
Take wooden sailing ships robust enough to make it across the world’s oceans.
This was a net good for trade, but not good at all for many indigenous people’s worldwide
interacting with the ship builders.
But there are other incidents where we came close, at least in the eyes of some.
This was particularly important during the Manhattan project and the development of the
atomic bomb.
Early on in the project and under the utmost secrecy Edward Teller became concerned that
since an atomic bomb detonation would be the hottest thing ever to occur on the surface
of the earth, the rules might be a bit different than we’d anticipated.
Remember, this is effectively having the temperatures of the center of the sun here on earth, if
only briefly.
His concern that it might ignite the atmosphere and cause things like the air and water to
start fusing, set off a bunch of new calculations within the project.
They concluded that it wouldn’t happen, and indeed during the first nuclear test at
the Trinity site at White Sands, New Mexico the atmosphere did not ignite.
The problem is that there were other times when the calculations were indeed off, most
famously in the castle bravo nuclear shot where the yield of the bomb was way higher
than predicted due to a miscalculation that an isotope of lithium would be inert, and
it turns out it was not.
It’s anyone’s guess in the secrecy of companies developing technologies along with
governments if such mistakes will continue to happen as we blunder our way into advanced
technology.
But it remains a possibility that all technological civilizations across the universe are eventually
ended by the technology that no one thought.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently concerned about the
candy peep population.
For the uninitiated these strange marshmallow candies are ubiquitous in the US during Easter
and are shaped like birds, for unknown reasons.
No one is entirely sure who makes them, aliens anyone?
nor is anyone willing to admit to consuming them.
But having gone grocery shopping yesterday and looked around, oh they’ve multiplied.
Thousands of different types now in a dizzying array of colors, now including blue for whatever
that’s worth.
The invasion is in full swing and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online
book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the
interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.