Hm, sorry, I did not mean to imply that the defense/offense ratio is infinite. It’s hard to know, but I expect it’s finite for the vast majority of dangerous technologies[1]. I do think there are times where the amount of resources and intelligence needed to do defense are too high and a civilization cannot do them. If an astroid were headed for earth 200 years ago, we simply would not have been able to do anything to stop it. Asteroid defense is not impossible in principle — the defensive resources and intelligence needed are not infinite — but they are certainly above what 1825 humanity could have mustered in a few years. It’s not in principle impossible, but it’s impossible for 1825 humanity.
While defense/offense ratios are relevant, I was more-so trying to make the points that these are disjunctive threats, some might be hard to defend against (i.e., have a high defense-offense ratio), and we’ll have to do that on a super short time frame. I think this argument goes through unless one is fairly optimistic about the defense-offense ratio for all the technologies that get developed rapidly. I think the argumentative/evidential burden to be on net optimistic about this situation is thus pretty high, and per the public arguments I have seen, unjustified.
(I think it’s possible I’ve made some heinous reasoning error that places too much burden on the optimism case, if that’s true, somebody please point it out)
To be clear, it certainly seems plausible that some technologies have a defense/offense ratio which is basically unachievable with conventional defense, and that you need to do something like mass surveillance to deal with these. e.g., triggering vacuum decay seems like the type of thing where there may not be technological responses that avert catastrophe if the decay has started, instead the only effective defenses are ones that stop anybody from doing the thing to begin with.
Hm, sorry, I did not mean to imply that the defense/offense ratio is infinite. It’s hard to know, but I expect it’s finite for the vast majority of dangerous technologies[1]. I do think there are times where the amount of resources and intelligence needed to do defense are too high and a civilization cannot do them. If an astroid were headed for earth 200 years ago, we simply would not have been able to do anything to stop it. Asteroid defense is not impossible in principle — the defensive resources and intelligence needed are not infinite — but they are certainly above what 1825 humanity could have mustered in a few years. It’s not in principle impossible, but it’s impossible for 1825 humanity.
While defense/offense ratios are relevant, I was more-so trying to make the points that these are disjunctive threats, some might be hard to defend against (i.e., have a high defense-offense ratio), and we’ll have to do that on a super short time frame. I think this argument goes through unless one is fairly optimistic about the defense-offense ratio for all the technologies that get developed rapidly. I think the argumentative/evidential burden to be on net optimistic about this situation is thus pretty high, and per the public arguments I have seen, unjustified.
(I think it’s possible I’ve made some heinous reasoning error that places too much burden on the optimism case, if that’s true, somebody please point it out)
To be clear, it certainly seems plausible that some technologies have a defense/offense ratio which is basically unachievable with conventional defense, and that you need to do something like mass surveillance to deal with these. e.g., triggering vacuum decay seems like the type of thing where there may not be technological responses that avert catastrophe if the decay has started, instead the only effective defenses are ones that stop anybody from doing the thing to begin with.