Anders Sandberg

Abstract:

The biosphere represents the global sum of all ecosystems. According to a prominent view in environmental ethics, ecocentrism, these ecosystems matter for their own sake, and not only because they contribute to human ends. As such, some ecocentrists are critical of the modern industrial civilization, and a few even argue that an irreversible collapse of the modern industrial civilization would be a good thing. However, taking a longer view and considering the eventual destruction of the biosphere by astronomical processes, we argue that humans, a species with considerable technological know-how and industrial capacity could intervene to extend the lifespan of Earth’s biosphere, perhaps by several billion years. We argue that human civilization, despite its flaws and harmful impacts on many ecosystems, is the biosphere’s best hope of avoiding premature destruction. We argue that proponents of ecocentrism, even those who wholly disregard anthropocentric values, have a strong moral reason preserve the modern industrial civilization, for as long as needed to ensure biosphere survival.

Abstract:

Responsible innovation efforts to date have largely focused on shaping individual technologies. However, as demonstrated by the preferential advancement of low-emission technologies, certain technologies reduce risks from other technologies or constitute low-risk substitutes. Governments and other relevant actors may leverage risk-reducing interactions across technology portfolios to mitigate risks beyond climate change. We propose a responsible innovation principle of “differential technology development”, which calls for leveraging risk-reducing interactions between technologies by affecting their relative timing. Thus, it may be beneficial to delay risk-increasing technologies and preferentially advance risk-reducing defensive, safety, or substitute technologies. Implementing differential technology development requires the ability to anticipate or identify impacts and intervene in the relative timing of technologies. We find that both are sometimes viable and that differential technology development may still be usefully applied even late in the diffusion of a harmful technology. A principle of differential technology development may inform government research funding priorities and technology regulation, as well as philanthropic research and development funders and corporate social responsibility measures. Differential technology development may be particularly promising to mitigate potential catastrophic risks from emerging technologies like synthetic biology and artificial intelligence.

Abstract:

The world faces a multiplicity of global catastrophic risks (GCRs), whose functionality as individual and collective complex adaptive networks (CANs) poses unique problems for governance in a world that itself comprises an intricately interlinked set of CANs. Here we examine necessary conditions for new approaches to governance that consider the known properties of CANs—especially that small changes in one part of the system can cascade and amplify throughout the system and that the system as a whole can also undergo rapid, dramatic, and often unpredictable change with little or no warning.