From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Oct 25 2002 - 05:16:04 MDT
On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 02:42:50PM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> It is fascinating to me that more than a day into one of the
> worst hostage taking situations the world has ever witnessed
> (~700 people involved =~ 2 747s) [at least to my knowledge],
> including two Americans, there hasn't been any notice at all
> by the Extropian list.
On the other hand, should we debate every such disaster in
particular? That would likely be more relevant for a news list. As
I see it, we should discuss it in the terms that can only occur
here: from its transhumanist relevance, how it fits in with the big
picture of human development. The specifics of events like this are
lamentable and touch our hearts, but that is not in itself a reason
(beyond social community) to make it an extropian debate subject.
> There is also an aspect of how dangerous people who have no
> hope may be to all of us.
...
> Finally, I see relatively few barriers to similar situations developing
> in the U.S. (or Europe) if sufficient numbers of people with a similar
> mindset are able to assemble themselves in one location.
Yes. It also shows that the threat of supertech terrorism might be
smaller than the threat of lowtech but well organised terrorism. If
there are any technological enablers here it is likely better
communications, which makes coordination easier.
In the past I have argued that the "problem of destruction" is that
the destructive ability of individuals increase with technology,
making the total risk from relatively rare but irrational
people increase. However, it seems that the risk associated with
irrational *groups* might be higher, and have a stronger technology
multiplier: beside the increase in destructive power, the
coordination ability might also grow. Even if the destructive power
is constant a slight increase in coordination increases the total
destructiveness enormously.
On the other hand the issue of counteracting these threats appears
to have a technology multiplier that largely depends on improved
coordination from law enforcement agencies; while new tech in
itself might help the actual enforcement the main issue is
detecting these threats before they cause damage, and this is an
area where clearly there is a big gap. It seems likely that
improvements are possible, and in the long run much of the
advantage to terrorist coordination might vanish due to
transparency or monitoring - if the probability of revealing an
attack plan per person involved becomes large enough the only
effective terrorist cells would be extremely small and isolated,
bringing the problem back to the irrational individual problem
mentioned earlier.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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