Inspired by a talk I had with James Faville.
Suppose that, sometime this decade, designer superbugs end up collapsing civilization as we know it, but not wiping out the entire species. Things are catastrophic, but enough people possess immunity to any particular act of bioterrorism that humanity ultimately pulls though. However, many nation-states collapse and AI capabilities progress, along with much else, regresses for many decades.
From the perspective of the deep future and the good lives that might inhabit it, how bad was this dark age? Did this narrowly avert a far greater catastrophe, by destroying a global civilization about to wipe out humanity via unaligned AGI, or did it just delay that destruction a century or so? Does a new dark age put us on a course to values unlike our own, such that even if survivor-humanity later succeed at alignment, much of what we care about is lost?
Too many variables to say, but GIVEN species survival, it’s probably noise in the variance of how true flourishing happens. The problem, of course, is that it’s not given—it’s quite possible that luck isn’t with us, or we’re wrong about resiliency of our species when disrupted that much, and it wipes us out, or sets up up to be wiped out over the following decades or centuries.
“Technology level is pushed several decades back” and “civilization collapses and dark age comes” are two very different scenarios.
I am pretty sure that if technology was pushed several decades back in some short term event, it would cause civilization collapse and a dark age in the longer term.