Check the heading – this is a guest post by Andrew Glikson and Emily Spence – not written by Prof. Brook.

Our lexicon of business activities is being expanded daily, thanks to the “wonder boys” on Wall Street. We are learning about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, recapitalization, puts, short selling and so on. We are gaining a new vocabulary from the recent meltdown of the financial system and expected slowdown of the real economy worldwide.

Where did this debacle begin? Well, it began in the center of human community’s banking and investment houses in the financial district of NYC. Supposedly, the “brightest and best” among us go to Wall Street, know what they are doing and do the right thing. Unfortunately, such assumptions turn out to be colossal mistakes.

How did this calamity occur and why is the human family in such dire economic straits? It appears that grotesque greed and a culture of corruption have come to dominate significant operating systems of the global political economy.

Powerful people in high offices within huge business institutions with access to great wealth are recklessly and deleteriously manipulating the unbridled expansion of the global economy in the small, finite planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.

Self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have surreptitiously “manufactured” a sub prime “asset bubble” and perversely fostered its uneconomic growth within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, this asset bubble did what bubbles do. The sub prime bubble burst and made a mess. Global credit markets have frozen, stock prices are tumbling and the value of the dollar is gyrating.

Evidently organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy, and the unraveling {ie, deleveraging} of the worldwide sub prime swindle, are running the artificially designed financial system of the global economy as a pyramid scheme. This is to say that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth funneled pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated. Note that thirty percent of annual corporate profits end up in the accounts of a tiny number of people. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. Does the economy of the family of humanity exist primarily to provide wealth to the already stupendously wealthy? The “bankstas” among us evidently think so.

In the 1980s, this extremely inequitable method of distributing wealth and arranging business activities was called a “trickle down” economy. We have been repeatedly told how this ‘rational’ economic scheme is good because it “raises all ships.” And yet, from my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources now appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The ‘ships’ carrying these billions of less fortunate people {ie, more people than lived on Earth in the year of my birth} do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

As for the risks from AI … I think these are overrated … my money is
on viruses as top killer risk. Take a harmless virus and cycle
it through chickens and you can make a killer in a couple of dozen
passes – 3 days per pass, 72 days in total.

Industrial chicken production has made a bird flu pandemic certain – it
is just a matter of when. If you were designing a system to
breed killer viruses, it would look like a modern broiler shed.

1) I have come to think that it is essentially impossible for the worst-case climate-change scenarios to occur (by this I mean three degree rises by the late 21st century, and so forth), precisely because it takes so many decades to get there that humanity will necessarily be stung into radical action sooner or later. As most readers of this blog will know, skeptics in the present point to the post-1998 plateau in temperatures as a ‘cooling trend’, and regard the 0.7 or so degrees of warming which have occurred over the past century as either natural variability or as the majority of the warming that will be induced, on the grounds that climate sensitivity is closer to 1 degree than to 3 degrees. So let’s suppose that they were politically successful, with all current mitigation initiatives being scuttled for twenty years, or otherwise reduced to Kyoto-like meaninglessness.

Now please examine Figure 5.5 in Garnaut’s draft report. In 2030, under a scenario of no mitigation at all, the world is about a degree hotter than it is now. By that point there would definitely be no denying the problem, and actions which in the present seem radical (like Hansen et al’s target-350 plan) will look like common sense. I conclude that there will never be a CO2-induced “planetcide”.

2) I also suspect that it is highly unlikely we will make it to 2030 without encountering a true extinction threat in the form of artificial life and/or artificial intelligence. Comparatively speaking, the global warming threat is a primitive threat arising from primitive technologies, and one which is slow enough in developing that (as I just argued) it will certainly be tackled sooner or later. On the other hand, artificial life and artificial intelligence are a highly complex and potentially fast-moving threat. I would submit that they, and not global warming, are the biggest challenge human beings will ever face, and if we’re still alive on the other side, it will either be because luddism won out completely, or because something like “Friendly AI” was successful. I find them a much more plausible subject for an exercise in cosmic/apocalyptic poetics like the present essay, in which one is trying to meditate on the destiny of intelligence in the universe.

3) I find the speculative psychology in this essay, which seeks to account for such phenomena as warfare and unsustainability, a little off in a number of places. For example, I would think that warfare in most cases is about the survival of a community – defending it against threats real or imagined – and as such it is nothing other than the struggle to live, played out by collectives rather than individuals. For an empire, regular warfare is a matter of maintaining a world order believed to promote survival. It is simply an illusion to think that the Holocene is an Eden from which we drove ourselves thanks to imaginary terrors. Droughts and famines are still a fact of life even in a “climatic optimum”.

4) Some minor points: The collective Martian society which suppresses its individual members is surely an image from Stapledon (“Last and First Men”) rather than Wells. And it seems rather unlikely that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the earth, given that more powerful collisions regularly occur in the upper atmosphere, as cosmic rays collide with the atoms there.

I confidently predict that hypothesis will never be proved.

Thanks for a brilliant post.