A game of chance
E xistential risk analyst and philosopher Nick Bostrom posits the idea of an urn containing all potential human inventions and discoveries in the form of white, grey and black balls. The white represent largely beneficial or at least benign human inventions, the grey those with a dual capacity for good and bad, and the black as purely malignant with no upside at all. Over time and increasingly since industrialisation, we have been enthusiastically reaching into the urn oblivious to any possible black balls that might be lurking. Often spurred on by incentives which could be described as greyish in tone, history has us simply reaching in and extracting balls with no concern for the legacy any discovery might leave in its wake.
If by good fortune we don’t pull a black ball from the urn, as in Bostrom’s example of easy nuclear fusion available to anyone with a microwave oven and sand, it could be that simply time combined with something initially benign or beneficial, puts paid to us all. Of course, for any element or idea to turn out bad, it may only require the catalyst of something as abundant as human stupidity and the propellant of short term advantage.
Who, on the discovery of the internal combustion engine and the endless growth it offered, thought of the negative implications it would have as it grew in affordability, use and ubiquity over the past century or so? The incentives at the outset weren’t aligned to the longer term secondary impacts but rather in the metric of stock price, dividends, market share and various other considerations sold on a dream of personalised freedom.
Any concept or design will improve over time and adapt to the needs of those who use it but only within the context and the knowledge available at the time. History is littered with such advances and while some have offered transitional benefits before being surpassed, others simply defy belief in retrospect.
The horse drawn carriage of goods and people was for much of history post agricultural revolution, both a driver of the economy at large as well as the many subsidiary industries that surrounded horses. Within the blink of an eye, gasoline replaced grain as fuel, and anything related to horses that couldn’t be turned over to the production of motorised transport withered and at best survived as a niche industry. Nobody but the most forward thinking could have had any idea of the century ahead and the speed of change was such that right up into the years before its fate was sealed, people were still investing in horse drawn carriage.
The sense of well being was probably so euphoric with such a sudden leap forward, that dubious improvements to the technology such as the addition of lead to petrol continued poisoning the air for decades. The same could be said about the battle some years earlier by Standard Oil and other corporations to ensure it was gasoline rather than ethanol that fuelled the new engines – sometimes cited as the real reason behind 1920s prohibition in the U.S. The once gleaming white ball lost a bit of its whiteness in very little time as the predictable forces of greed came into play and began directing traffic in such a way that saw them as prime beneficiaries. Meanwhile, most people were more concerned with the economic benefits seen as a result of the new technology which once allied to mass production, raced like steroids to every corner of the economy.
I’m in love with my car
The idea of the car as the fulfilment of almost every facet of individual transportation need is an easy sell because by and large it seems true and maps fairly closely onto the reality experienced by so many. It also ticks as many boxes as it does because the world has been made around it and alternatives from the point of view of expectation are mostly second best.
Not even the stark difference between the TV commercial and the daily crawl to work on a slow moving car park seems enough to break in on the dream. The commercial starring a top end car enjoying a traffic-free drive through stunning scenery serves as motivation rather than myth.
Anyone daring to question the deterioration in air quality, congestion, child asthma and thousands of unnecessary deaths per annum, had best prepare to be embroiled in arguments as vitriolic as they are unimaginative and self-serving. The off-white ball became grey as soon as it latched onto the needs of the individual and fed the ego with ideas of control over destiny.
It is difficult to avoid pessimism about the future of the planet while it remains in our custody. We are too contradictory, divisive and easily accustomed to bad habits to offer a rosier outlook and we are content to demand change from everyone but ourselves. Perhaps the white was just packaging and beneath it the balls were always destined to get darker with use.
David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech ‘This is water’ , at Kenyon College, begins with a story of an old fish meeting a couple of younger fish. The old fish greets them and asks how the water is. The two swim on for a while before one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”
Did we notice the now grey ball getting even darker in hue? If we had, would we have altered our behaviour or, like a new smoker feeling the extra effort now needed to complete a minor task, ignore it because the upsides seem more plentiful?
Just how dirty will the once attractive white ball have to get before we admit it isn’t any longer white, or are we hell bent on hitting the bumpers?
Physicist David Deutsch once characterised human history as being one of failure to improve on the lot of previous generations. Artefacts dug up over the years show almost no technological advancement for periods of tens of thousands of years.
Hunting weapons and by implication the techniques employed in the pursuit of prey, like other areas of human endeavour are almost indistinguishable from one ten thousand year time span to another and show a species constantly living on a knife edge of potential extinction. Bad practises were repeated with almost no perceptible learning as our ancestors bumped into the walls of their experience without altering course for millennia. Lives were short, brutal and plagued by disease and a broad palette of misfortune.
Perhaps our addiction to advancement is down to having had so little of it over the course of our evolutionary history. Given the slow pace of evolution, we are effectively running the same stimulus software today as our ancestors on the African plains though without yet having learnt to pace ourselves. Like the kid in the sweet shop we find it all a bit hard to resist and especially when the structures of incentives are often divergent from the common good.
When compared with the much longer time our cousins the Neanderthals inhabited the planet, we are still relatively untested in terms of what nature could throw at us. However, it is not only a question today about what nature has up its sleeve, but what we have in store for ourselves as we continue to reach eagerly into Bostrom’s urn.
As interesting and witty as always!
Is this road to hell accompanied by the Chris Rea earworm I now have? 😉