From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Oct 25 2002 - 09:46:06 MDT
On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 08:03:59AM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> While the debate of ongoing and seemingly irresolvable conflicts
> seems pointless (the Israeli-Palestinian situation comes to mind),
> the debate of a resolvable conflict seems worthy of discussion.
> The resolution in this situation could range from deporting all
> Chechnyans, as Stalin did, to simply freeing Chechnya from Russia.
There is also the issue of low-trust societies. This is a case of two
extremely low-trust societies (or one, depending on one's view) coming
into conflict. In a high-trust society the Chechnya issue would have
been dealt with using political methods more or less accepted by the
people involved, in a low-trust society there is no trust in any other
process than coercion. The problem could be reformulated as "how do we
help develop more high-trust societies?" (which is good from a purely
selfish point of view too, since we can trade more profitably with
high-trust societies and don't have to worry about terrorists from
them).
> It begs a number of extropic issues that go back at least to the
> U.S. civil war -- when does one let "your" people go?
This may become significantly troublesome if mankind starts to clade in
interesting ways. But even before then there are issues of people
wanting to set up societies with different granularity. There does not
seem to be any workable protocol for it at present (even in extreme
high-trust societies "national interests" are allowed to dominate such
processes, e.g. in the Åland island question between Sweden, Finland and
the people of Åland).
> > 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.
>
> Yes, but the same transparency and monitoring that can defeat
> terrorist organizations seem likely to defeat organizations that
> would (legitimately) seek to overthrow an oppressive regime.
>
> It would seem that to preserve our safety and security we may
> have to give up our ability to overthrow a government that has
> "cooked the books" so to speak. [In the U.S. the memories of
> the Nixon era have not completely faded.]
Hmm, time for some thinking caps. Ideally we should have a way of
overthrow governments in a democratic way. An imaginary box with the
sign "In case of national emergency, break glass" that could only be
activated if a sufficient number of citizens pushed, but could not be
removed or blocked by the government (and it could not tell who had been
pushing the glass either).
In democratic nations much of this system is implemented as
constitutional mechanisms, relying on the difficulty of corrupting
systems with distributed power. The above "box" could after all be
implemented as an automatic impeachment order if a sufficient number of
crypto-validated signatures were received. But it would be more elegant
if it could be implemented on a deeper level, including being tacked on
to unwilling governments.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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