From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Nov 25 2002 - 06:39:50 MST
On Sun, Nov 24, 2002 at 09:31:57PM -0500, Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
> We can,
> however, strengthen our own economic and political structure to better
> withstand a WMD assault. What happens if Stockholm is destroyed? Where and
> who will automatically take over, after such an event. Can we assign a
> committee to run things for 10 months while parties and the remaining
> electorate get organized?
This is a constructive question. As for Stockholm, my
roleplaying/scenario planning group actually discussed it during the
weekend. It turns out that unexpectedly nuking Stockholm would likely
wipe out nearly all of the higher government functions. There are fairly
clear guidelines on who gets to run what in this situation, and they are
known widely enough in the local administration so that a proper
transfer of authority would occur very quickly. Essentially the regional
administrations would continue running things as before, any surviving
MPs would be put into an emergency cabinet and parts of the police and
military would be assigned a coordinating role (if I understood the
legalese). But that a society doesn't crumble into anarchy because of a
decapitation is not really about laws, but a civil society where people
implicitely trust each other and their authorities to some extent. No
amount of emergency laws can save a decapitated tyrrany.
Another, more serious issue in the decapitated Sweden scenario would be
the long-term effects. One eight of the population is located in
Stockholm, and it has a far larger part of the economy and is an
important infrastructure hub. While I have no doubt that there would be
a new parliament in Gothenburg within a few months, it seems likely that
the loss of Stockholm would wreck the economy and make Sweden plummet
economically for many years. Maybe not to total third world nation, but
at least to a former East block nation status (likely with a
psychological malaise not unlike Eastern Europe). It is such a drastic
change that it could start a sequence of random government changes, loss
of trust and decline of open societies that the country would have to
restart the long climb towards a rich open society from scratch.
This is just an example, but it shows that many nations are worrying
vulnerable to nukes, meteors or whatevers. France is even more
centralized in Sweden, just imagine what would happen if Paris became a
crater. The US at least has a federal structure, but the global impact
of New York being vaporized would be enormous.
> Ultimately though, the USA, Sweden, or the Netherlands cannot "harden"
> themselves enough to be "bullet proof". This is where the USA or anyone else
> needs to put on fangs and claws and horns and go fight the jihadi on their
> own soil (waiting for boos and hisses on this one!). As cold-blooded as this
> is, once enough bad guys are dead or disheartend to make another attack, we
> have won...for a while. That "while" that I mention is likely enough for
> people to build and continue their life's works. This seems to be how nature
> is. I don't have to like this, just realize it.
The problem is that some of the threats are not really fightable in this
sense. Unrawelling a terrorist network is tricky, but doable with
dilligent intelligence work and international cooperation. Wiping out
the most odious and dangerous regimes is trivial (although doing it in a
way that keeps one's population, other nations and the citizens of the
nation in question happy is another thing entirely). But what about
accidents and single-person terrorism? If I went mad and started to plan
and execute the most malign plot I could hatch, there is a high
likeliehood that nobody would notice anything amiss until the tanker
with concentrated ammonia in the harbour went boom, the dirty bomb
exploded in downtown or something similarly awful happened. Even one or
two losers with sniper rifles can do a lot of damage. Even if they are
caught, it is only after the damage they have done has been done. Most
solutions to this problem have been simplistic or unacceptable (usually
drastic surveillance powers, but as I have argued before it is unlikely
to be really useful in the near future, which is where we have to live).
Instead, it makes a lot of sense to figure out how to create more
distributed and resilient societies. If governments can survive
decapitations, why can't economies? Right now there are strong
incentives for going to the big cities, which means they are sensitive
points. Can we modify things so that this is no longer the case? In
Sweden the government has relocated a number of organizations and
departments to other cities, not out of security concerns but simply to
get the regions more jobs, which incidentally would mean a bit more
resilience. I dislike this kind of centralist solution, but I wonder if
there are ways of getting economies of scale to work the other way and
actually get people to move away from centralized systems. Better
communications might be one aspect, but that is only a partial answer.
Do we have any good examples where economies or other free agent systems
spontaneously form resilient distributed networks rather than
centralized systems with weak points? The Internet is almost such an
example, although it does have some serious weaknesses with the root
servers and domain name system. Various ant computing ideas certainly
fit, but how do we turn them into businesses that make more money than
centralized businesses?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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