A hammer is a lever. A wedge is a lever. A pully is a lever. All of them increase the ability for a person to do work, and so more advanced machines slow us to do even more work. Computers and advanced machines will continue this process, so we can say they are useful.
However, we can say that like all tools, greater leverage indisputably comes with creates greater risk. For example, the earliest weapons could only maim or kill a few people at once. Today, advanced technology is far more capable. For example, the largest nuclear weapon in the world today, Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat or Satan 2, which they declared as “unstoppable” and as having “unlimited range,” and equivalent to 400 times larger than the bombs dropped on Japan in WW2. If all nukes were launched today, aimed at a populous or essential area, I would gues that at least 90% of people could die.
And leverage risk it is not just limited to weapons. Look at stock market risk with derivatives, leveraged trades, and even something relatively benign like fractional banking. When things go up, leverage multiplies the returns, but when things go down, they are leveraged downward in multiples much higher than would be possible without such leverage.
All of the Top Risks to Humanity are Advanced Technology
There are several organizations that attempt to define existential risk, meaning risks so great that it threatens our entire existence. These include the Global Challenges Foundation, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, etc… but for simplicity, most of the top concerns are essentially the same. Notice the top five on this list.
- Artificial intelligence: machines that are smarter than us can replace us, intentionally, or unintentionally.
- Synthetic biology: biowarfare or bioterrorism become much riskier when the ability and cost of engineering viruses and pathogens decrease.
- Extreme climate change: caused by humans of course
- Nanotechnology: microscopic robots
- Nuclear war
- Major asteroid impact
- Global pandemic
- Super-volcano
- Ecological collapse
- Global system collapse
- Bad global governance
More importantly is the risk when several of these are combined. E.g. Governments build a totalitarian state using AI and nanotech which manufactures bioweapons.
Note that current technology can make it easier to create a totalitarian state. Just as Zymunt Bauman who noted in the “Modernity and the Holocaust” that without advanced technology and processes, killing on an efficient, industrial scale would not have been possible.
Evil minds + leverage = terror
Of course, keeping the leverage away from the bad guys is the real challenge.
HumanIT 