I share your frustration and anger with how we dealt with the Covid pandemic, and that experience certainly made me a lot more pessimistic about our ability to deal with any other impending disasters like AGI doom.
That said, the first part of your post feels to me like it’s equating “we didn’t fund preparation for this” with “we didn’t learn from this”. I agree with the latter, but there are tons of things our civilization could’ve done that hardly required any funding (in particular, removing regulatory barriers, e.g. to things like human challenge trials), and conversely, we can and do put arbitrarily high amounts of funding into various topics without actually doing much or any good on them.
And separately, to me there’s a far more fundamental lesson from events like Covid than “Humanity learned nothing”: namely that there is no such thing as a ‘Humanity’ that could learn from things and that no-one is in charge. (On LW, this meshes with concepts like Heroic Responsibility and HMPoR’s Nihil Supernum.)
There are occasionally individuals and individual organisations that act with some kind of agency towards some particular purpose, and which sometimes accomplish good things (one I read about was VaccinateCA). But Humanity is not a hive mind, we’re merely the aggregate of a few billion humans, and while we do certainly act with more purpose and direction than the particles in a gas, we don’t ultimately act with that much more purpose. To me it looks more like we’re at the mercy of faster and stronger processes: like the exponential growth of Covid infections, or the seeming inevitability of economic and technological growth.
I share your frustration and anger with how we dealt with the Covid pandemic, and that experience certainly made me a lot more pessimistic about our ability to deal with any other impending disasters like AGI doom.
That said, the first part of your post feels to me like it’s equating “we didn’t fund preparation for this” with “we didn’t learn from this”. I agree with the latter, but there are tons of things our civilization could’ve done that hardly required any funding (in particular, removing regulatory barriers, e.g. to things like human challenge trials), and conversely, we can and do put arbitrarily high amounts of funding into various topics without actually doing much or any good on them.
And separately, to me there’s a far more fundamental lesson from events like Covid than “Humanity learned nothing”: namely that there is no such thing as a ‘Humanity’ that could learn from things and that no-one is in charge. (On LW, this meshes with concepts like Heroic Responsibility and HMPoR’s Nihil Supernum.)
There are occasionally individuals and individual organisations that act with some kind of agency towards some particular purpose, and which sometimes accomplish good things (one I read about was VaccinateCA). But Humanity is not a hive mind, we’re merely the aggregate of a few billion humans, and while we do certainly act with more purpose and direction than the particles in a gas, we don’t ultimately act with that much more purpose. To me it looks more like we’re at the mercy of faster and stronger processes: like the exponential growth of Covid infections, or the seeming inevitability of economic and technological growth.