Nuclear weapons are orders of magnitude more powerful than conventional alternatives, which helps explain why many countries developed and continued to stockpile them despite international efforts to limit nuclear proliferation.
Yet the number of nuclear weapons in the world has decreased from its peak during the cold war. Furthermore, we’ve somehow stopped ourselves from using them, which suggests that some amount of steering is possible.
With regards to the blogpost as a whole, humanity fits their picture the most when it is uncoordinated and trapped in isolated clades, each of which is in a molochian red queen’s race with the other, requiring people to rapidly upgrade to new tech if only to keep pace with their opponents in commerce or war. But this really isn’t the only way we can organise ourselves. Many societies made do fairly well for long periods in isolation without “rising up the tech tree” (e.g. Japan post-sengoku jidai).
And even if it is inevitable… You can stop a car going at 60 mph by slowly hitting the brakes or by ramming it into a wall. Even if stopping is “inevitable”, it does not follow that the wall and the gentle decceleration are identically preferable for the humans inside.
From the mechanise blogpost:
Yet the number of nuclear weapons in the world has decreased from its peak during the cold war. Furthermore, we’ve somehow stopped ourselves from using them, which suggests that some amount of steering is possible.
With regards to the blogpost as a whole, humanity fits their picture the most when it is uncoordinated and trapped in isolated clades, each of which is in a molochian red queen’s race with the other, requiring people to rapidly upgrade to new tech if only to keep pace with their opponents in commerce or war. But this really isn’t the only way we can organise ourselves. Many societies made do fairly well for long periods in isolation without “rising up the tech tree” (e.g. Japan post-sengoku jidai).
And even if it is inevitable… You can stop a car going at 60 mph by slowly hitting the brakes or by ramming it into a wall. Even if stopping is “inevitable”, it does not follow that the wall and the gentle decceleration are identically preferable for the humans inside.