This article examines the risks posed by “unknown unknowns,” which I call monsters. It then introduces a taxonomy of the unknowable, and argues that one category of this taxonomy in particular should lead us to inflate our prior probability estimates of annihilation, whatever they happen to be. The lesson here is ultimately the same as the Doomsday Argument, except the reasoning is far more robust.
Many riskologists identify nuclear weapons as having introduced the first anthropogenic existential risk in human history. (Existential risks are the red and black dot events here, on the condition that the black dots are particularly severe.) Nick Bostrom, for example, writes that “The first manmade existential risk was the inaugural detonation of an atomic bomb.” [1] But this is probably incorrect. The Holocene extinction event, for example, probably began in the Pleistocene, when our ancestors started to “overkill” the megafauna. Global warming also began prior to the Atomic Age, and in fact scientists in the 1930s were the first to uncover a warming trend in temperature records dating back to 1865. [2] So there were at least two anthropogenic risks that began to unfold before the Trinity explosion at the Jornada del Muerto (meaning “journey of the dead man”) in 1945.
Let’s take a closer look at global warming for a moment. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) have many sources in the contemporary world. The number one source in the US is the generation of electricity, followed by transportation, which is almost entirely reliant upon the combustion of fossil fuels. [3] As it happens, the story of modern transportation – specifically, of the automobile – is an interesting one, and marked by a fair bit of irony. By the end of the 1800s, many cities were facing an urban pollution nightmare: they were being overrun with horse manure, urine, and carcasses in the streets. According to the Times of London, 9 feet of excrement was projected to cover the streets of London by 1950; on the other side of the Atlantic, an observer suggested that the accumulation of crap would reach the third story of Manhattan’s buildings by 1930. The result was an unbearable odor, major sanitation problems, congestion, gridlock, and swarms of flies (which studies have found were responsible for “deadly infectious maladies like typhoid and infant diarrheal diseases” in the nineteenth century [4]). The situation was so dire that the first ever urban planning conference, which hosted delegates from around the world, convened to fix it, but “stumped by the crisis, [they] declared [their] work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.” [5]
Enter the automobile, which offered a surprising solution to this rapidly worsening public health snafu. “As difficult as it may be to believe for the modern observer,” writes Eric Morris, a professor of City and Regional Planning at Clemson University, “at the time the private automobile was widely hailed as an environmental savior.” Indeed: no more manure, and the automobile proved to be just as effective a means of transporting goods and people from one place to another. It was, consequently, adopted en masse by both the upper and middle classes. What no one foresaw at the time, of course, was that the automobile’s internal combustion engine, which converts fossilized plant matter into usable energy by igniting it on fire (and thereby releasing CO2), would become major contributor to one of the most significant big picture hazards of the following century.
Thus, we could say that global warming constitutes an unintended consequence of the automobile (although we are fully aware of the connection between automobiles and global warming today). The theorist Langdon Winner defines an unintended consequence as an effect that’s “not not intended,” meaning “that there is seldom anything in the original plan that aimed at preventing them.” While unintended consequences have been ubiquitous throughout the great experiment that we call human civilization – a driving force of innovation, in fact – global warming is unique in that it was the first unintended consequences with existential implications.
But it almost certainly won’t be the last. If history has taught us anything about purposive human behavior, it’s that intended causes proliferate unintended effects. This leads to an absolutely crucial point: as advanced technologies become more and more powerful, we should expect the unintended consequences they spawn to become increasingly devastating in proportion. In other words, the future will almost certainly be populated by a growing number of big picture hazards that were not not intended by the “original plan,” as it were, and which are significant enough to threaten humanity with large-scale disasters, or even extinction.
Press link for more: Phil Torres | ieet.org
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