Peace through Interdependence, Safety through Impoverishment and Freedom through Redundancy
three paradigms for Nick Bostrom's Vulnerable World
The Vulnerable World Hypothesis is, simply put, the theory that as technology advances, it lowers the bar for inflicting catastrophic destruction, and that this can only be “solved” by establishing a police state under which all citizens are constantly monitored at all times to make sure they’re not building doomsday devices and all rival nations outside of said police state must be forcibly conquered or otherwise reformed in its image, to likewise prevent their citizens from doing so.
Originally this seemed unlikely, and that the real threat of the hypothesis wasn’t that it was a genuine concern, but that it’d be used as a propaganda justification for miscellaneous foreign and domestic authoritarianism. As Saddam proved, if they say you have weapons of mass destruction, for them to attack you supposedly to remove said weapons is proof they’re lying, if you did have WMDs, you’d be safe from invasion.
Then Operation Spider’s Web and increasingly capable Large Language Models trained on DNA came along and it suddenly looked a lot less stupid.
As
put it1, terrorism against infrastructure via drones smuggled into the enemy heartland via civilian transportation mechanisms is cheap, effective and trying to prevent it does significant damage in and of itself by requiring either expensive inspections of all transportation, defensive measures for all vital infrastructure or ideally, both.He went on to point out this model upends geopolitics as we know it and wonders what the new equilibrium it’ll create will be.
I had my own theories.
Peace through Interdependence
The post-Cold War neoliberal capitalist End-Of-History status quo. The idea that if all vital logistics are distributed between all nations, such that nobody can wage war on anyone else without crippling their own supply chains, it’d ensure world peace. And somehow also make every nation involved in said global economy see the natural superiority of neoliberal capitalist democracy and adopt it2.
Downsides are:
Lenin turned out to be completely right about capitalists selling the very rope the communists will hang them with. Less poetically, any nation which wasn’t governed by neoliberal capitalists inevitably outsourced all vital manufacturing and resource extraction because said jobs had lower immediate financial returns than elaborate legalized fraud like banking and servitization. The only nations able to keep domestic industries were those ruled by tyrants who murdered any financier oligarchs who dared step out of line rather than by said oligarchs3. Therefore barring MAD deterrence ensuring nobody would win, said tyrannical nations would win any war by default because they were the only ones capable of replenishing their losses and their citizenry hadn’t been demoralized into mutinousness by decades of losing out on zero-sum economic competition.
It means any disaster, anywhere, rather than just harming the locals, causes civilization-destroying cascade failures and destroys everything for everyone. We turned one pissant little island’s chance of getting conquered from a local problem for the islanders which the rest of the world could safely ignore in their newspapers into a hair-trigger for direct warfare between nuclear superpowers with all electronics hanging in the balance that threatens the world.
Safety through Impoverishment
If anyone can use commonplace items to build destabilizingly dangerous superweapons, this can be prevented by bankrupting most of the population such that only the ruling oligarchy can afford access to dangerous technologies. If personal computers can run LLMs planning perfect crimes and the genomes of bioweaponized plagues and personal electronics can build infrastructure-sabotaging drones, these need to be cracked down on like nuclear material. Which can be done by jacking up their price to the point where nobody but “trustworthy” oligarchs can use them.
This ties into the upcoming AI Unemployment Crisis, it’s an ideological excuse. Now the oligarchs can consider their machines driving everyone else out of work morally justified4, since if anyone else had money, they could use it to acquire resources to make themselves a threat.
Downsides are:
Impoverishing most of the population.
Guarantees a zero-sum arms race. If it’s a choice between being helpless without a superweapon for MAD deterrence or trying to build the most dangerous, weaponizable exploitations of every form of technology you can get your hands on even if doing so risks losing control of it, your Destruction is Assured anyway in the first option so you’ve got nothing to lose by trying the second.
Freedom through Redundancy
Instead of futilely trying to prevent attacks from destabilizing complex systems into logistical cascade failures, build so many backups for every portion of your logistics chain that it can work around sudden unavailabilities. Every nation needs the production and resource extraction capacity for autarky or ideally, multiply redundant backups as the highest if not only priority of National Security.
This may be tied with populist nationalism. Under this system, domestic manufacturing jobs are an imperative, not because they make the inhabitants prosperous, but because not having them is an existential military threat. Likewise firm border security, it isn’t important because the inhabitants want it, but because without thorough identification and quarantine periods for anyone trying to enter the nation, everyone gets killed by engineered plagues. And so forth and so on.
Any nation which doesn’t do so will inevitably be crippled by logistical cascade failures, then replaced by one which does as it gets economically neocolonized by foreigners whose nations export their manufactured surplus in exchange for buying up all their victims’ assets.
Downsides are:
Economically ineffective. Zero-sum capitalist economics trends towards monopolies, this system requires actively going out of its way to keep multiple businesses offering the same products and services functional and separate.
Requires the most resources and produces the most pollution out of these three options because it has the maximum amount of industrialization of them. And once said resources run out altogether and/or the climate becomes completely unlivable, everyone’s fucked.
Doesn’t actually solve the vulnerability issue. As
described it; “we blow up the global-scaled manufacturing apparatus with cheap drones until the drones aren’t cheap anymore” but repeatedly as a Lotka–Volterra model. Civilization repeatedly builds up technological and manufacturing prowess, lowering the barrier of entry to dangerous capacities, until the use of said capabilities destroys the civilization that made them available. Repeat indefinitely, or at least till the natural resources run out.
It’s unclear whether its claimants actually believed their own propaganda, or if their actual goal was always cost-cutting by outsourcing, unionized first-worlders with worker and environmental protections being more expensive than foreign slave labor.
When people are wondering what dynamic 'economic power influences cultural evolution' looks like: this is it. Economic pull of AI incentivizes creation of ideologies which advocate to give AIs as much power as possible, as soon as possible. The arguments may be very weak, but when the incentives are strong, motivated cognition does the job. -Jan Kulveit