July 23, 2013
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The exact opposite of light reading.
JDN 2456497 EDT 08:55.
A review of Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic
Light reading generally requires three things: Short, easy to read, and on a light-hearted subject. This book is none of those things: it consists of over 500 pages of scientific essays on the end of the world.
Setting the tone is the first chapter by astrophysicist Fred Adams about the inevitable death and decay of the universe. The basic message is that in 100 billion years, we will be dead, so get used to it.
The rest of the book is downhill from there; topics include supervolcanoes, gamma-ray bursts, climate change, pandemics, evil AI, physics experiments that destroy the Earth, nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, bioterrorism, self-replicating nanobots, and totalitarianism. Cheery stuff, basically. Climate change is actually considered a relatively minor problem; after all, it’s “only” estimated to kill about 30 million people.
The best essays are actually in Part I, about general cognitive biases and approaches toward risk. James J. Hughes wrote an excellent essay on apocalyptic and millennial ideologies; Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essay on cognitive biases affecting risk judgment is brilliant. Milan M. Cirkovic’s essay on anthropic biases is particularly chilling: we may think that certain events are unlikely simply because, had they happened, we wouldn’t be here. The only essays in Part I that aren’t very interesting are Yacov Y. Haimes’ essay on “systems-based risk analysis” (which is mostly obvious common sense restated in technical jargon, e.g. “The myriad economic, organizational, and institutional sectors, among others, that characterize countries in the developed world can be viewed as a complex large-scale system of systems.”), and Peter Taylor’s essay “catastrophes and insurance” (which basically just talks about how insurance only works if your economy hasn’t collapsed).
The essays on specific threats honestly aren’t that compelling; they don’t present a unified narrative or give a good sense of what risks we should be most worried about or most focused on preventing. The net effect is sort of a list of ways we could die, without a clear sense of how we should be trying to protect ourselves. The book presents itself as trying to save humanity, but ends up feeling more like a pessimist’s anxiety dreams.
