Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready

Yeah, it's hard to see why not if your view of technology is something like that of medieval demonology, which appears to be the thesis of this article.

Meanwhile, in reality land, you can make explosives and poison gas out of stuff in your kitchen, automobiles put a ridiculous amount of kinetic energy in the hands of individuals, this has been true for 100 years, and somehow "the state system" has done just fine; strengthened even in that period of time.

Also Bostrom is a nincompoop and no article that mentions him deserves to be taken seriously.

If the “state” can’t defend me from fanastical threats, it serves no purpose and we should abolish it? Nope, don’t agree again. I accept that my state can’t guarantee ultimate protections from a Vin Diesel-like movie threat situation. However, my state provides other benefits like: funding for education, business regulations and tax credits, lending regulation, infrastructure build/repair, funding construction projects (my industry), wildlife protection, park systems, etc.

Joke of an article.

Aspiring fascists are always trying to save us from ourselves.

So you "only" need 10 million drones and 10 million grams of plastic explosive? An attack of that magnitude probably requires the resources of a nation-state, so I doubt it will happen. Targeted assassinations seem more plausible.

It seems to be that anyone sophisticated enough to put 10 tons of plastic explosive in any form wherever they feel like is already quite capable of causing massive casualties.

Somehow, to make this even remotely plausible, we need to intersect a lot of unlikely combinations (a bunch of really bad guys who are hugely resourced, very technical and intelligent, completely uninfiltrated, fighting for some goal that isn't going to be radically harmed by the optics of killing thousands of soft targets).

Go big or go home, I guess.

Let's take something that's entirely possible using current technology. A small group of motivated individuals could purchase thousands of toasters and turn them into bombs and mail them all to politicians or schools or _____ and set them to all explode at the same time. But that doesn't happen. A group could use agar and antibiotics to breed up a bunch of highly-resistant MRSA and use syringes to infect half the grocery section at dozens of stores on the same day and in doing so kill tens of thousands of people. But that won't happen either.

Just because you can imagine something and not think of a reason it's impossible doesn't mean it's a realistic threat.

Or you could start a meme about sneaking up on people and punching them in the head to try to knock them out, styling it as some sort of game.

Guess which one I'm more worried about.

This is not serious minded analysis, but it's not fun either. It's just bad clickbait.

No system can stop every dedicated attacker to begin with. Technology gives people leverage in all their activities, including doing violence to one another. Writing an article in Nautilus that amounts to idle musing about a comic book villain's murderbot scheme and then trying to burnish it as Very Serious at the end with name dropping and the author's academic credentials is so lame.

It's like a bad Black Mirror fanfic.

>the only plausible escape from this conundrum, at least from our present vantage point, is the creation of a “supersingleton” run by a friendly superintelligence, founded upon a “post-singularity social contract.”

I didnt read the paper, but that abstract sounds firmly rooted in sci-fi with a toe in nonfiction, instead of the other way around as im sure the author believes.

K/K has been very low for at least 50 years and probably longer. The idea that a terrorist would smuggle millions of drones to cause... Car crashes... Is the stuff of a high school writing class. i am 100% positive there are cheaper and more effective tools available to cause more serious damage that currently actually exist (and have for decades), and we dont have the society the author claims.

I volunteer to write that fair governing powerful algorithm. You can trust me to make it fair and not make it favor my biases and interests.

This makes the nation state more relevant not less. The state can best fund countermeasures and preemptive investigations. They can work with nations who will work to police themselves so they don't have to deal with the backlash involved in locals killing a million people far from home and if needed punish nation states who fail in such policing.

Within a decade, 'nudes being leaked' will no longer be controversial or damaging because they'll cost a couple hundred dollars or less to manufacture and won't have credibility.

I'd argue that one of the best things a 'chaotic good' actor could do today to fight revenge porn is to manufacture a huge quantity of deepfake porn of random targets and release it, so speeding along this process.

The real threat of technology comes from the power it gives to governments. Bad actors can do more damage through the political process than any other.

I suspected as much since the simulation argument but looks like Bostrom has really lost his marbles.

True, it all sounds like scaremongering, but the question is: what's stopping people from actually doing this?

Crime and violence already exist. And if we look at history, it is clear that it has changed with the times. What logical sense is there in thinking they will not follow the changes in technology today?

The events described are but a possibility. Yet, I do feel we should not dismiss it, simply because we don't like it.

Can you tag a gene with your twitter handle?

EDIT: ok, i found a clip of (a fairly big) drone firing a gun and it looks... not stable:

https://youtu.be/FI--wFfipvA

still, pretty worrisome.