The Grand Illusion
As I’ve written before, technology effectively multiplies everything where it’s applied. The first automobiles were painstakingly hand-assembled, and only the wealthy could afford them. That was also true for a vast array of consumer goods and machines, so that a middleclass American lives in greater personal luxury (except for vast grounds and huge cold or too hot palaces and being able to order people around) than did Louis XIV of France (the Sun King).
We take much of this for granted, and many seek even more in the way of comforts, goods, and conveniences. That, after all, is a supremely human trait.
But there’s one application of technology that human beings handle supremely well, alas, and that’s the development and application of weapons. There are more than a hundred commercial small arms manufacturers in the world, and more than fifty of them are located in the U.S. According to the 2017 Small Arms Survey, there are more than one billion firearms in the world, with almost four hundred million held by civilians in the United States. Most “standard” AR-15 type rifles can take magazines holding up to 100 rounds.
As mass shootings in the U.S. have demonstrated, weapons light enough for 14-year-olds and those even younger can wreak havoc in seconds. And on the military level, the President of the United States and the Premier of the Russian Federation can, at least theoretically, each launch up to 5,000 nuclear warheads within a matter of minutes, which in practical terms would effectively destroy civilization on the planet, along with the vast majority of human beings.
Not content with creating these weapons, “creative” geniuses are working on ways to weaponize our communications systems, improve autonomous weapons systems through AI, and investigate biological weapons of various sorts.
Is the culmination of human evolution and creativity to come up with weapons effective enough that a single individual can destroy the entire human race (or most of it) with one push of a button, one release of software, or the creation of one killer virus? Possibly without even a human being directly involved?
And if we survive that, will the next step be to invent a way to pulverize the planet?
These questions aren’t quite facetious; human beings are awfully good at weaponization of almost anything, and we’re getting better by the year.
Anything anyone comes up with can be used for good or ill.
Almost always both.
That doesn’t bother me. The enormous concentration of power into one person’s hands (any person’s) does, and yet it goes largely unquestioned in most societies.
I wonder if it’s something we picked up in evolution. Or in the millennia of living in tribes. Putting so much faith into one person might have made sense when it was our champion against theirs. But now?
Populism. Celebrity culture. Making athletes into heroes. We sure seem to want to have someone to idolize.
And, as you pointed out, it sure can work against us.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/ai-america-ready-wars-future-ukraine-israel-mark-milley-eric-schmidt –
Shows how future wars might be fought with continued evolution and development of weapons. It also mentions but does not develop our willingness to kill “innocent” individuals; not only via mass shootings but with the evolution of “terrorism” from the concept of “total war”.
The increasing production of literature such as “THE 48 LAWS OF POWER”
ROBERT GREENE author Joost ELFFERS producer from 1998; incites our base desire to control other humans and supplements our killing instinct.
It does seem that your concern of a single “human” wiping out our single planet is not at all misplaced. As always, or at least too frequently, the way to stop this apparent slide into oblivion is up to our sovereign selves demonstrating constant self-control, and at least considering others, before we act.
Nuclear weapons release takes more than one push of a button. Two man rule all the way from the top down; at least in the US, UK, France; and hopefully Russia and China. I wouldn’t count on that degree of sanity in North Korea.
Yes, I can think of a way to pulverize (or nearly) the planet with existing technology. But it would be slow enough to instigate and obvious enough, that it might well be possible for some other power to stop it.
I think the Iranian leadership would be willing to be suicidal insofar as they imagine themselves as going to Paradise if they die in battle against the infidel, so it’s a win either way in their minds (even the ones that view themselves as less expendable really do see it that way); and the North Korean leadership acts as though should they lose their power, the loss of any amount of lives either in their country or elsewhere would be a small consideration by comparison. So either might be crazy enough to use whatever they had if they felt their options were excessively narrowing. But most wouldn’t, although those that constantly push can be expected to keep pushing if they’re not opposed, so best oppose them early.
Per FBI crime statistics, knives and blunt objects are used in more murders than all rifles and shotguns put together (handguns are top, though).
Pacifists, unless they participate at least in domestic vigilance by speaking out against abuses of power by government no less than by individuals, are part of the problem more than the solution.
Google AI suggests:
The phrase “part of the problem” implies a passive stance, while “being part of the solution” implies a conscious effort to work through a problem.
If “pacifists” are part of the problem it would suggest that they are usually the ones who make an effort to find a non-zero-sum solution to the “problem”. Such as win-win or the alternatively balanced loose-loose solution. Pacifists tend to be positive: sometimes overly optimistic when dealing with human relationship “problems”.