I liked Robin Hanson’s recent post Unending Winter Is Coming (it matches my understanding of at least one scenario of how physics/computation/war is likely to work in the future), but find his lack of urgency for trying to solve the problem puzzling. To quote my comment there:
Our descendants may not have the same opportunities to solve this problem that we have. At a minimum it seems much easier (even if still very hard in an absolute sense) to solve this problem (for example by coordinating to build a Singleton / strong world government) before human or post-human civilization starts spreading into the stars. It seems like lack of urgency is only justifiable if one was very certain that space colonization is far in the future, and I don’t see how that belief is justifiable.
I liked Robin Hanson’s recent post Unending Winter Is Coming (it matches my understanding of at least one scenario of how physics/computation/war is likely to work in the future), but find his lack of urgency for trying to solve the problem puzzling. To quote my comment there:
His recent research on automation might relate to his lack of urgency here.