Disaster Professor: Total Surveillance Is the Only Way to Save Humanity - The author of "The Simulation Argument" says one bad technology could destroy humanity — and the only way to prevent it is an AI overlord.

Professor: Total surveillance is the only way to save humanity

We're doomed to destroy ourselves if we don't embrace mass surveillance, he argues.

futurism.com

The Oxford philosopher who posited 15 years ago that we might be living in a computer simulation has another far-out theory, this time about humanity’s future — and it’s not exactly optimistic.

On Wednesday, Nick Bostrom took the stage at a TED conference in Vancouver, Canada, to share some of the insights from his latest work, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.”

In the paper, Bostrom argues that mass government surveillance will be necessary to prevent a technology of our own creation from destroying humanity — a radically dystopian idea from one of this generation’s preeminent philosophers.


Black Balls
Bostrom frames his argument in terms of a giant urn filled with balls. Each ball represents a different idea or possible technology, and they are different colors: white (beneficial), gray (moderately harmful), or black (civilization-destroying).

Humanity is constantly pulling balls from this urn, according to Bostom’s model — and thankfully, no one has pulled out a black ball yet. Big emphasis on “yet.”

“If scientific and technological research continues,” Bostrom writes, “we will eventually reach it and pull it out.”


Dystopian AF
To prevent this from happening, Bostrom says we need a more effective global government — one that could quickly outlaw any potential civilization-destroying technology.

He also suggests we lean into mass government surveillance, outfitting every person with necklace-like “freedom tags” that can hear and see what they’re doing at all times.

These tags would feed into “patriot monitoring stations,” or “freedom centers,” where artificial intelligences monitor the data, bringing human “freedom officers” into the loop if they detect signs of a black ball.


Two Evils
We’ve already seen people abuse mass surveillance systems, and those systems are far less exhaustive than the kind Bostrom is proposing.

Still, if it’s a choice between having someone watching our every move or, you know, the end of civilization, Bostrom seems to think the former is a better option than the latter.

“Obviously there are huge downsides and indeed massive risks to mass surveillance and global governance,” he told the crowd at the TED conference, according to Inverse. “I’m just pointing out that if we are lucky, the world could be such that these would be the only way you could survive a black ball.”

 

[Sm0kINHaZefEEliNBlaZEd]

Bostrom frames his argument in terms of a giant urn filled with balls. Each ball represents a different idea or possible technology, and they are different colors: white (beneficial), gray (moderately harmful), or black (civilization-destroying).

When you, in essence, have to draw on analogies to make your argument you've more than lost the plot. The humanities have zero capable intellectuals left. If it weren't for the fact that a lot of colleges force students to take these courses all these fucks would be unemployed.

 

[Zersetzung]

Also I don't think for a single second that he hadn't copied The Matrix when he came up with his simulation theory. Even if he didn't see it he must have at least known about.

Simulation theory is just a publicly-consumable repackaging of ordinary solipstistic thought experiments of which there are many. I think The Matrix might have set out to give the public a language to discuss some of those ideas, kinda like how Guardians of the Galaxy laid out Boltzmann Brains with actual flying space brains. Formal solipsism supposedly goes back to Descartes but even that seems like a repackaging of much older Buddhist concepts, which are themselves probably just a continuation of a philosophical core that goes way back beyond recorded history and shows up in all that shit we label ancient "dualism". The Matrix itself references earlier sci-fi that had similar metaphors.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Reminder that fascism was very popular with Western "intellectuals" pre-WW2, and communism is still somehow popular with academics.

Communism will never stop being popular among most academics and intellectuals because they know that's the only way they would (supposedly) make any money.

I have friends who graduated from Humanities or Social Sciences and all of them are hired by the state. Private business don't have any need for Gender Scholars, but certain state organizations end up taking people who sell them feminism and the likes as the solution for most problems. Of course, they all are socialists or very close to be.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Simulation theory is just a publicly-consumable repackaging of ordinary solipstistic thought experiments of which there are many. I think The Matrix might have set out to give the public a language to discuss some of those ideas,

Thank you! It's so annoying to see people talking about this stupid "Simulation theory" as if it is an original and exciting thought. It's an idea older than fucking dirt. "How do we know this isn't a dream" has been a question in the human mind since we had a moment to think about it, who is doing the dreaming, whether it be ourselves, some other thing, a computer, doesn't really matter.

All we know is that our inputs are being activated. We assume it's by actual real stimuli, but the only way to verify anything is with those same inputs. There's no way to be sure anything is "real".

 

[Secret Asshole]

If you want to imagine the future Winston, picture a boot, stamping on a human face. Forever.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

If you want to imagine the future Winston, picture a boot, stamping on a human face. Forever.

Hey, the robot had to stamp on that human's face. He was just about to pull a black ball out of the urn!

 

[Gorilla Tessellator]

I think that black balls here are the next stage of blue balls, and hence the metaphor.

His idea is highly redundant, come to think about it. If there is a strong suspicion we live in a simulation, isn't it a situation of the perfect surveillance? Or not all my quests are saved to the motherfucking server, that's what you are trying to say Bostrom?

And also who the fuck cares if some black ball appears out of nowhere and entire simulation goes to hell?

I guess logical consistency is not that important to him...

 

[Secret Asshole]

On the sim theory, my favorite idea behind that is that this is just one giant social MMO. That each of us is this immortal alien. You go in the MMO because you're immortal and have everything catered to you. So you need to remember what suffering was like otherwise the while society collapses. It's not really for fun, it's just to remember when life was hard. Because otherwise you'd end up like a decadent civilization which basically destroys itself through ennui. So we're in this horrible MMO so we gain perspective and our society doesn't fall to insane cruelty.

 

[dirtydeanna96]

what this guy describes is less like the Matrix, and more like World on a Wire, from the early seventies
in the Matrix, if you unplug, you still have a few (seven and a half billion?)
psychical brains (and bodies) existing outside.
in world on a wire, everyone exists in (spoiler) a nested simulation. turn off a lower simulation, and everyone in it dies.
less like dulaism, more like monism\Panpsychism. this would takemore processing power, also, we aren't real.
we are one with the fake universe.
he wants to invent an AI so the people above us don't "turn us off"
he should just become Abrahamic. its what I did.

 

[Fish-Eyed Fool]

So basically human society needs the Sibyl System. Great.

 

[Otterly]

I don’t get the logic - how does individual surveillance stop a ‘black’ tech? Such a thing would be unlikely to be developed by an individual...

Alexa, can you explain..? Oh wait...

 

[Fork Cartel]

There's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Is Jerry Pournelle still alive? I used to read his column in Byte which was vaguely amusing, but all his books were those fucking terrible cast of thousands fantasy shlock where everyone had names like önly'fifty'accénts'in'this'öné. I remember he went off the deep end after 9/11. so I guess this was his senile years stuff.

He died a year or two back. I attended a conference in 2016 where he was going to some award ceremony, but didn’t get a chance to see him cause he got health problems

 

[Fatrick Hamlinson]

I support Huxley's view in that technology is essentially neutral: it could be turned to evil purposes if it's used that way, but it could also be used to benefit mankind. I like to think of guns in this way: they can be incredibly useful for self-defense, particularly if you are physically outmatched and the other party intends to kill you. However, we all know how they can be used to terrorize and intimidate one's opponents, not to mention remove them from life permanently.

This philosopher's analogy makes no sense: as an example, technology doesn't fit neatly into the three categories (of beneficial, slightly bad, and bad) he's devised. Moreover, to which category would he assign his concept of worldwide monitoring? It can be used for evil purposes, such as finding blackmail material, and yet he espouses it as a beneficial technology.

 

[Exterminatus]

Total surveillance is always an insane proposition, even back when we passed the PATRIOT Act. The freedom of privacy is probably one of our most vulnerable ones but it's always a no-go for me, I'd like to see shit like the PATRIOT Act get rolled back too but I'd doubt we'll ever see that, once the government gets it's foot in the door you're very likely fucked.

 

[Equivocal_Iki]

white (beneficial), gray (moderately harmful), or black (civilization-destroying).

Yeah I can't take the ideas of a white supremacist seriously.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Yeah I can't take the ideas of a white supremacist seriously.

So then was he talking about white people, black people, and aliens? Because calling aliens neutral is insane, even for a white supremacist.

 

[Gustav Schuchardt]

Was just listening to this

Making Sense with Sam Harris #151 - Will We Destroy the Future? (with Nick Bostrom)

It's a conversation between Sam Harris and Nick Bostrom. Spoilers - Bostrom is unconvincing. He actually reminds me of the environmentalists in the 70s. They had some ideas about a potential apocalypse but were not yet in a position of power where those ideas could be used to limit people's freedom to engage in the behaviours which could cause that apocalypse.

So many pro-Communist academics ignore that if the revolution were to come, they would be the first against the wall.

They just think they're special and would somehow be anointed with a top position in the Party.

I was trying to dig up an apposite Orwell quote and found this

It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.

Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.

Now we live in a world where DisneyMarvelLucasfilm produces movies by committee with a message that is basically about deconstructing identities the left don't approve of and inventing identities they do approve of. And if you look at the Marvel movies superhero they're very much produced by rearranging predefined plot points - most of them are about an ordinary guy who becomes a superhero and fights a bad guy who has access to the same superpowers. At some point they decided to mix it up a bit by having heroes that weren't all white and male and then portraying all criticism as sexism and/or racism. Same thing happened with Disney's Star Wars sequels. They took the plot beats of the original Star Wars, and did a few gender and race swaps on the good guys but kept the bad guys all white men. And then claimed any criticism was sexist and racist.

Is our society still 'broadly speaking liberal'? Not really. The most you can say is that in the US it's not the government censoring you, but rather corporations and the mob. In the UK the government will arrest you for 'misgendering'. Across most of Europe hate speech laws, mob violence, media smear campaigns and deplatforming are used ruthlessly to crush any opposition to the elite's plans.

It's not 1984 and it's not Brave New World. But that doesn't mean it's a liberal society of the kind Orwell was so keen to see survive.

 

[X Prime]

Now I would broadly agree with you, except...

Is our society still 'broadly speaking liberal'? Not really. The most you can say is that in the US it's not the government censoring you, but rather corporations and the mob.

...corporations have vast lobbying power in the US. I mean, you were just talking about Disney. Part of the reason copyright keeps lengthening is because Disney doesn't want to lose Steamboat Willie.

Obamacare was basically passed with collaboration from insurance corporations.

Et cetera.

So I ask you... is there a difference?

 

[ZeCommissar]

How would a AI which would have limitations since it would have to be made by limited humans even know what new technologies are black balls?

This doesn't make any fucking sense. Besides nuclear war what black balls are left? Gray Goo? Man-made Black holes? Fusion power? We are talking about technologies that may not even be physically possible, nevermind world ending. Right into the realm of science fiction.

Although I guess since we are talking about super-powerful and intelligent AIs that could somehow stop humanity from creating bad technolgies we are already within that realm.

Also I would rather that human society ends then we as a species be shackled to some 1984 hellhole for the rest of time. Be free or die trying to be.

 

[Iwasamwillbe]

Thank you! It's so annoying to see people talking about this stupid "Simulation theory" as if it is an original and exciting thought. It's an idea older than fucking dirt. "How do we know this isn't a dream" has been a question in the human mind since we had a moment to think about it, who is doing the dreaming, whether it be ourselves, some other thing, a computer, doesn't really matter.

All we know is that our inputs are being activated. We assume it's by actual real stimuli, but the only way to verify anything is with those same inputs. There's no way to be sure anything is "real".

Some argue that there is no genuine distinction between a sufficiently advanced simulated universe and a "real" universe, especially if the simulation has self aware entities contained within it, and/or the simulation and the "reality" can interact somehow (like with technology).