Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, October 13, 2007

"Real" Threats, Rhetorical "Threats"

Upgraded and adapted from Comments

Michael Anissimov writes: We know that there exist technologies that threaten large numbers of human beings -- nukes for instance. If the reality of this threat is "congenial to the military-industrial complex", then do you propose we go into denial and ignore it?

I do indeed think that Cold-War hysteria, as well as contemporary Global War on Terror hysteria are discourses that benefit corporate-military incumbent interests and that we should be wary of these discourses and the skewing of budgetary priorities and security policy they inspire.

To understand this is not to go into denial but to see more clearly. To understand this is not to ignore reality but to direct our attentions more productively.

You speak of "the reality of this threat," and once again fail to address the question from the perspective actually assumed by my piece -- the piece you are presumably criticizing.

It is not the reality of threat, but the discursive framing of what comes to be taken as "the threat" that concerns me in this instance. Now, to return to the topic at hand, what I am critiquing as Superlative Discourses do not transparently reflect so much as they frame technodevelopmental concerns in my way of thinking of these matters here.

It is their framing that seems to me congenial to incumbent interests, and it is their framing that I object to as a person of the democratic left. Do you see our differences more clearly now?

By the way, nukes exist and Robot Gods don't. This matters.

And if you are moved to make the drearily inevitable genuflection at this point to Kitty Hawk or the Manhattan Project let me say that in my estimation the science of air-flight and nuclear weapons were incomparably more solid prior to their arrival on the scene than is the "science" of entitative post-biological superintelligence given the developmental timescales that exercise the imaginations of Singularitarians.

Those concerned with extinction risks care about the them in spite of their sociopolitical implications, not because of them!

If you are more concerned about an asteroid impact than climate change, or more concerned with the arrival of an Unfriendly Robot Overlord than WMD proliferation then you honestly need to have your head examined. And if you manage to convince enough others to skew media accounts and budgetary dollars to reflect your priorities you are doing untold damage to the prospects for human flourishing.

The rhetorical implications of a technological threat are not the criteria by which the probability of that threat should be judged. This should be obvious.

God, this is a really tired old song from you guys at this point. Don't you know any other?

My point, of course, is that your sense of the probabilities in play is far more responsive to what you are thinking of as readily dismissable "rhetorical" factors than you realize. It sometimes seems as if you think you are just trotting off facts and figures transparently given in the facts of reality themselves when you spin off into Robot Overlord scenarios, Nano-Santa scenarios, Digital Immortality scenarios, and so on.

But you're not. You're really, simply not.

I can imagine you at the first atomic bomb test, saying "this bomb can't possibly work, because it would provide powerful rhetorical rationales congenial to neoliberal/neoconservative outlooks!" Then the bomb explodes anyway, because it obeys the laws of physics, not the laws of rhetoric.

Sigh...

Now I suppose you think you're Einstein. Look, to the extent that the detonation of the Bomb occurred in the aftermath of a process of discovery, testing, publication, funding, regulation, propaganda, interdisciplinary and international rivalries and so on, as it happens, it was very much an event with a rhetorical context (usefully susceptible to rhetorical analyses) as well as a Physical context. The meaning and significance of that explosion in its aftermath was conspicuously articulated by rhetorical factors.

So, even on your own terms it looks to me like you are simply utterly embarrassingly wrong here.

But quite apart from all that, as I said, you are probably not Einstein, and the Robot Overlord scenario is certainly not the Bomb. You think debating the Robot God odds in a futurological circle-jerk of white boys dreaming of brite toys is remotely equivalent to the science, scientists, infrastructure, substance on hand at the testing of the first bomb.

Talk about false analogies and rhetorical mechanisms! Your delusions aren't real, Michael however real they seem in the shared fervor of belief binding a futurological fandom.

[T]ranshumanist organizations tend to get their funding from many small donations (the people), rather than a few large donations or grants from incumbent interests.

This point is well taken. My complaint for now concerns what I see as the undue influence Superlative Technocentric Discourses (I have a comparable complain about the influence of bioconservative discourses) have on the public framing of technodevelopmental quandaries. You will be pleased to know -- as I very definitely am NOT -- that I fully expect the corporate-militarist gravy train to discover Superlativity in a big way quite soon. [Within a few years of this post the role of tech-CEO billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk funding singularitarian and transhumanoid futurological fantasies became widely known, and futurologists with distinctly Robot Cultic coloration like Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis were connected with high-profile digital network and aerospace giants like Google, while eugenic, singularitarian, and futurological existential risk discourses from steal Robocultic think tanks at Stanford and Oxford became corporate-sponsored government-approved mainstream policy making powers. --d]

I've come to terms that all of what you talk about is ad hominem.

Nothing could be more obvious than that my critique is not properly reducible to ad hominem attacks, although there is a certain sad inevitability about this charge from you people. It's really too bad.

There's a reason why ad hominem is listed as among the logical flaws in an argument

Quite so, guy. Which is why I teach it to undergraduates in the fallacies lectures in my critical thinking and logical argumentation courses. You crack me up sometimes, Michael, you really do.

But since I've come to terms with it, it's what I expect.

I think, to the contrary, that you have "come to expect" what you need to expect to insulate your Singularitarian True Belief from threatening criticism.

12 comments:

jimf said...

Michael Anissimov wrote:

> The rhetorical implications of a technological threat are not the
> criteria by which the probability of that threat should be judged.
> This should be obvious.

Yep, pretty obvious. Of course, you (and other True Believers) simply
ignore "the criteria by which the probablility of that threat
should be judged" if those criteria don't meet your a prior standards
of True Belief.

This leads to the interesting rhetorical framing of somebody like
Richard Smalley as a crackpot and somebody like K. Eric Drexler as
the epitome of calm reason.

But no, no -- this isn't rhetoric, it's the Way of Rationality (TM).

:-/

Anonymous said...

If you are more concerned about an asteroid impact than climate change, or more concerned with the arrival of an Unfriendly Robot Overlord than WMD proliferation then you honestly need to have your head examined.

"More concerned" in what sense? I don't know which of WMD proliferation or unfriendly AI is the more likely existential risk, but since there are far more people currently working on WMD proliferation than UFAI, it may be justifiable for me, personally, to give exclusive focus to the latter.

Dale Carrico said...

I wrote: "If you are more concerned about an asteroid impact than climate change, or more concerned with the arrival of an Unfriendly Robot Overlord than WMD proliferation then you honestly need to have your head examined."

Nick Tarleton responded: "More concerned" in what sense?

Uh, in the sense of spending more of your time thinking about, in the sense of trying to distribute budgetary resources more in the direction of, and so on? What did you think I meant?

Nick continued: I don't know which of WMD proliferation or unfriendly AI is the more likely existential risk

Really? Really, honestly? Do you really mean this?

Dale Carrico said...

Jim, I definitely hear you on this one, but I have to admit I think Smalley -- while he is obviously far from the "quack" some silly Superlatives like to paint him as for having the temerity to critique an Idol of theirs -- came off less well against the Drexlerians on the merits than he might have done. People of goodwill will disagree on that one (I thought de Grey did all right in the Pontin dispute as well, on a similar note). But, needless to say, none of what I say in this connection should offer much in the way of consolation to those who would pine Superlatively after Nanosanta (or Techno-Immortality for that matter) in any case.

And your larger point still seems both true and important, that Superlativity is skewing the criteria on the basis of which technocentric people seem to be assigning to mainstream scientists (however critical they may be of fetishized Superlative programs) the designations of seriousness, trustworthiness, respectability, soundness in general, and so on.

jimf said...

Michael Anissimov wrote:

> I can imagine you at the first atomic bomb test, saying
> "this bomb can't possibly work, because it would provide
> powerful rhetorical rationales congenial to neoliberal/neoconservative
> outlooks!" Then the bomb explodes anyway, because it
> obeys the laws of physics, not the laws of rhetoric.

Well, dang those silly pomo homos and their relativist
(**not** relativistic! ;-> ) view of Truth.

OK, I've been looking for an excuse to insert this one
(when I did this sort of thing on WTA-talk, James Hughes
accused me of posting "hostile encyclopedias" ;-> ):

(Note to Michael: If this is TL:DR for you, despite my
having gone to the effort of hi-liting choice passages from
a 600 page book, then by all means skip it. Eliezer wouldn't
agree with it anyway -- he told me once, in response
to my suggesting to him that folks in many fields had
moved away "foundationalist" theories of truth and ethics
to "coherentist" ones, that I, like many of my generation,
had been hopelessly bamboozled by the SSSM. I was
completely knocked speechless, and started quoting passages
from Ullica Segerstrale's _Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology
Debate_ to him in my defense ;-> . But I later realized
that accusing me of being an acolyte of the SSSM ("Standard
Social Science Model" -- you know, radical environmentalism,
Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and the UNESCO Accord -- something
Eli probably heard about in Cosmides and Tooby) -- was simply
his way of calling me an unregenerate Lefty. Who says
the transhumanists eschew politics! :-0


From _Philosophy in the Flesh_: The Embodied Mind and its
Challenge to Western Thought_
-- George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

1. Introduction: Who Are We?

How Cognitive Science Reopens Central Philosophical Questions

The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

These are three major findings of cognitive science. More than two
millennia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects
of reason are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy
can never be the same again.

When taken together and considered in detail, these three findings
from the science of mind are inconsistent with central parts of
Western philosophy. . .

Our understanding of what the mind is matters deeply. Our most basic
philosophical beliefs are tied inextricably to our view of reason.
Reason has been taken for over two millennia as the defining
characteristic of human beings. Reason includes not only our
capacity for logical inference, but also our ability to conduct inquiry,
to solve problems, to evaluate, to criticize, to deliberate about how
we should act, and to reach an understanding of ourselves, other
people, and the world. . . It is surprising to discover, on the
basis of empirical research, that human rationality is not at all
what the Western philosophical tradition has held it to be.
But it is shocking to discover that we are very different from what
our philosophical tradition has told us we are.

Let us start with the changes in our understanding of reason:

-- Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held,
but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience.
This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body
to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure
of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment.
The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive
and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes
of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the
details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general
mechanisms of neural binding. In summary, reason is not, in any
way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied
mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of human
bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of
our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in
the world.

-- Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and
makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in "lower"
animals. The result is a Darwinism of reason, a rational
Darwinism: Reason, even in its most abstract form, makes use of,
rather than transcends, our animal nature. The discovery that reason
is evolutionary utterly changes our relation to other animals
and changes our conception of human beings as uniquely rational.
Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other
animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them.

-- Reason is not "universal" in the transcendent sense; that is,
it is not part of the structure of the universe. It is universal,
however, in that it is a capacity shared universally by all
human beings. What allows it to be shared are the commonalities
that exist in the way our minds are embodied.

-- Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious.

-- Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and
imaginative.

-- Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged.

This shift in our understanding of reason is of vast proportions. . .
What we now know about the mind is radically at odds with
the major classical philosophical view of what a person is. . .

------------------------------------------

6. Embodied Realism: Cognitive Science Versus A Priori Philosophy

Two Conceptions of Cognitive Science

Philosophy is so much an implicit, although not always recognized,
part of all intellectual disciplines that it has determined,
for many investigators, the conception of what cognitive science
is. There are at least two approaches to cognitive science
defined by different philosophical commitments: a first-generation
cognitive science that assumed most of the fundamental tenets of
traditional Anglo-American philosophy and a second generation that
called most of those tenets into question on empirical
grounds. . .

The First Generation: The Cognitive Science of the Disembodied
Mind

Cognitive science got its start with a context. . . [that]
accepted without question the prevailing view that reason was
disembodied and literal -- as in formal logic, or the manipulation
of a system of signs. . .

Accordingly, it seemed natural to assume that the mind could
be studied in terms of its cognitive functions, ignoring any ways
in which those functions arise from the body and brain. The
mind, from this "functionalist" perspective, was seen metaphorically
as a kind of abstract computer program that could be run on
any appropriate hardware. A consequence of the metaphor was that
the hardware -- or rather "wetware" -- was seen as determining
nothing at all about the nature of the program. . .
This was philosophy without flesh. . .

The Second Generation: The Cognitive Science of the Embodied Mind

By the mid- to late 1970s, a body of empirical research began to
emerge that called into question each of these fundamental tenets
of Anglo-American "cognitivism." . . .

The key points of the second-generation embodied view of mind are
the following:

-- Conceptual structure arises from our sensorimotor experience and
the neural structures that give rise to it. The very notion of
"structure" in our conceptual system is characterized by such
things are image schemas and motor schemas.

-- Mental structures are intrinsically meaningful by virtue of
their connection to our bodies and our embodied experience.
They cannot be characterized adequately by meaningless symbols.

-- There is a "basic level" of concepts that arises in part from
our motor schemas and our capacities for gestalt perception
and image formation.

-- Our brains are structured so as to project activation patterns
from sensorimotor areas to higher cortical areas. These constitute
what we have called "primary metaphors." Projections of this
kind allow us to conceptualize abstract concepts on the basis of
inferential patterns used in sensorimotor processes that
are directly tied to the body.

-- The structure of concepts includes prototypes of various sorts:
typical cases, ideal cases, social stereotypes, salient exemplars,
cognitive reference points, end points of graded scales,
nightmare cases, and so on. Each type of prototype uses a distinct
form of reasoning. Most concepts are not characterized by
necessary and sufficient conditions.

-- Reason is embodied in that our fundamental forms of inference
arise from sensorimotor and other body-based forms of inference.

-- Reason is imaginative in that bodily inference forms are mapped
onto abstract modes of inference by metaphor.

-- Conceptual systems are pluralistic, not monolithic. Typically,
abstract concepts are defined by multiple conceptual metaphors,
which are often inconsistent with each other.

In short, second-generation cognitive science is in every respect
a cognitive science of the embodied mind. . . Meaning has to do
with the ways in which we function meaningfully in the world
and make sense of it via bodily and imaginative structures.
This stands in contrast with the first-generation view that
meaning is only an abstract relation among symbols (in one view)
or between symbols and states of affairs in the world (in another
view), having nothing to do with how our understanding is
tied to the body. . .

------------------------------------------

12. The Mind

No Consistent Conception of Mind

. . .

We have no single, consistent, univocal set of nonmetaphoric concepts
for mental operations and ideas. Independent of these metaphors, we
have no conceptions of how the mind works. Even the notion **works**
derives from the Mind as Machine metaphor. Even to get some **grasp**
of what ideas in themselves might be, we have to conceptualize ideas
as graspable objects. To approach the study of ideas from any
intuitive point of view is to use metaphors for ideas that we already
have. What a theory of mind of a theory of ideas must do is pick
a consistent subset of the entailments of these metaphors In so doing,
any consistent theory will necessarily leave behind other entailments,
inconsistent with these, that are also "intuitive". . .
It appears that there is no comprehensive and consistent theory that
is also metaphorically intuitive -- that is, made up of entailments
of the above metaphors.

Metaphors for Mind and Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy

Anglo-American analytic philosophy is based on technical versions
of the metaphors for mind and thought that we have just analyzed. . .:

The Mind as Body. . .
Thought as Motion. . .
Thought as Object Manipulation. . .
Thought as Language. . .
Thought as Mathematical Calculation. . .
The Mind as Machine. . .

The notion that reasoning can be seen as a form of mathematics has
as its correlate in the everyday metaphor of Thought as Mathematical
Calculation, especially in its entailments. . . which conceptualize
reason as a universal form of mechanical calculation using
sequences of written symbols. . .

Those same assumptions lie behind the idea of artificial intelligence
(AI). Classical AI assumed that thoughts can all be adequately
expressed in a logical language (a computer "language" like LISP)
and that reason is a matter of mechanical calculation and proceeds
in a step-by-step fashion. Given these assumptions, it followed
that computers could "think rationally." This view was the basis
for the metaphor for the mind assumed in first-generation cognitive
science, The Mind Is A Computer, in which a "computer" is understood
in the following way:

'A computer is a machine that reasons via mathematical computations
using a language whose expressions are objects that are manipulated;
it communicates by sending and rememebers by storing.'

. . .

The Oddness of Anglo-American Philosophy

Consider a cognitive scientist concerned with the empirical study
of mind, especially the cognitive unconscious, and ultimately
committed to understanding the mind in terms of the brain and
its neural structure. To such a scientist of the mind, Anglo-American
approaches to the philosophy of mind and language of the sort
discussed above seem odd indeed. The brain uses neurons, not
languagelike symbols. Neural computation works by real-time
spreading activation, which is neither akin to prooflike deductions
in a mathematical logic, nor like disembodied algorithms in
classical artificial intelligence, nor like derivations in a
transformational grammar.

Cognitive scientists looking for a naturally based account of
understanding must turn to the brain and body for empirical
reasons. They cannot start a prior with a logician's set-theoretical
models. Nor will they start a priori with a theory of meaning
in which meaning has nothing to do with mind, brain, body, or
experience, but is given in terms of reference and truth.
Meaning in a neurally-based cognitive theory can only arise through
the body and brain and human experience as encoded in the brain.

To a cognitive scientist in the empirical tradition, the approach
of Anglo-American philosophy to mind and language seems quite
bizarre. . .

Strong Artificial Intelligence

There are three attitudes that one can take toward the conceptualization
of the mind as a computer as stated in the Mind As Computer metaphor.
First, one can, as we are oding, note that it is a metaphor and
study it in detail. Second, one can recognize its metaphorical
nature and take it very seriously as a scientific model for the
mind. . . Many practitioners of what has been called the weak
version of artificial intelligence take this position.

A third position has been called "strong I." When the Mind As Computer
metaphor is believed as a deep scientific truth, the true believers
interpret the ontology and the inferential patterns that the
metaphor imposes on the mind as defining the essence of mind itself.
For them, concepts **are** formal symbols, thought **is** computation
(the manipulation of these symbols), and the mind **is** a
computer program.

For true believers, the essence of mind is computation. . .
Once the Mind As Computer metaphor is taken as defining the
very essence of mind, it is not consciously seen as a metaphor
at all, but rather as "the Truth."

jimf said...

Michael Anissimov wrote:

> [R]hetorical implications. . . are not the
> criteria by which. . . probability. . . should be judged.
> This should be obvious.

You know, I have to say that one of the dismaying patterns I've
observed in transhumanists' (and particularly Singularitarians')
lines of reasoning revolves around something similar to this --
wishful thinking.

From my e-mail archive:

---------------------------------
3. One should resist the temptation toward
premature **closure** about any aspect of the
Singularity. Especially basing all one's
expectations on this or that technology du jour
and then taking them oh-so-terribly seriously.
For one thing, it leads to putting the
cart before the horse for anyone who considers
verself a **scientist** to get that wrapped up
in "how things **must** be, or **must** happen,
if the sky isn't going to fall, or if we
aren't going to get immortality in time for me
or my friends or my family to live forever",
rather than on how things actually **are**.

For example -- I was always struck by the **party-line**
reactions on Extropians' to the question of whether the
universe is simulable, in principle, by a digital
computer. Yes, digital implementations have
advantages over messy "analog" ones (as has been
argued to death in the decades-long CD vs. LP
debate) -- you can correct errors, and stop the
clock and read out the precise state of a device.
Also, a digital implementation is an abstract
machine that frees you from the actual physical
substrate. But folks got so **angry** if you
suggested that the world might not be digital
after all. They thought you might as well
be telling them that the Singularity -- and the
"party at the end of time" -- had been cancelled.
My reaction to that bridling was always an
amused "so what?" Yeah, it'd be inconvenient,
by the standards of what we know now, but maybe
**not** by the standards that will prevail
closer along toward the Singularity. Do you
think the 18th-century French philosophes would
have thrown tantrums to learn that mechanical
clocks and gears would not be used in future
calculators? (Or could have believed a cursory
description of how an integrated circuit works?)
The alternative is to maintain a certain deliberate
**distance** from **everything** that counts
as "state of the art" today. I think this is
difficult for the literal-minded types attracted
to >Hism in the first place. It's another kind
of lateral thinking.
---------------------------------

In fact, I recall having a similar-flavored exchange
with **you** (Michael). I was making my usual remarks
about the implausibility of top-down AI (or GOFAI),
and how silly I thought it was that SIAI seemed to be
wedded to such an approach (despite decades of failure
and evidence from neuroscience and what Lakoff calls
"second-generation" cognitive science that it ain't
never gonna happen.

And you're response was -- well, we need it to be top-down
in order to be able to guarantee Friendliness (TM).

Talk about looking for your keys under the streetlight!!

Anonymous said...

I must admit Michael that I think Dale has you on this. The atom bomb, at a certain point, became basically just a technical challenge. It was a question of who could get there first. Once you understand Einstein's (and others) work properly you can start to imagine what it might be like to overcompress a radioisotope and then what the release of energy from that might be. The Germans were working on this problem just as the Allies were and had a good grasp of the same physics in spite of Hitler's idiocies about "Jewish Physics". They just didn't have the money and manpower to get it done before they lost the war due to conventional military factors.

The "problem" of strong AI, by contrast is one where the terms, parameters and, most disabling, the very theoretical foundations are still aborning. It would be the difference between being able to tell your engineers "you need to compress this specific purity of Uranium to this specific density on this specific timescale" and "you're going to need to compress something (we don't yet know what) and on a fairly short timescale, probably less than a second but maybe something just longer than the Planck time and to some density that's probably greater than twice its natural density but might be a trillion trillion times that or so.

The first is a specification. The latter is a vague speculative scenario and people are going to be justified in making fun of it.

brian wang said...

WMD proliferation.

No one has died from a nuclear weapon created from proliferation. The only nuclear weapons used were from the originating country the USA.

At this point we are primarily speaking in the past tense about proliferated nuclear knowledge.

Developed countries such as Canada, Japan, S Korea, Germany could all have nuclear weapons in weeks if they wanted them. They have all of the knowledge and materials to make them. They just choose not to.

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan proliferated the knowledge back in the mid-70s to Pakistan, Iran and N Korea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan

Almost all of the 200 million who have died in violent conflicts since 1900 have been killed with conventional bombs, bullets and blades.

brian wang said...

Since WMD proliferation has not killed anyone then what is the actual big risk and killer ? All out war between advanced states. This is war where the civilians are purposely targeted by advanced militaries. Currently the targeting of civilians by fairly advanced militaries only partially happened in WW2. Even though 2 million died in Vietnam and about 1 million have died in Iraq war 2 and 1 million in Iran/Iraq war, those have not been all out attacks on civilians by the dominant side.

So the best course of action is to reduce the causes and reasons for war. For many states that means eliminating the wars over oil. Nuclear energy makes up the dominant energy source that is not a fossil fuel. Solar power is a fraction of 1% of world power and wind is just getting to the 1% level. Nuclear is at 16%. From 439 nuclear reactors. There are 338 nuclear reactors in the Global construction pipeline. The past peak of global construction completed 24 reactors in a single year. The US completed 12 reactors in a single year. The technology exists to increase the power in current reactors by up to 20% conventionally and up to 50% using donut shaped fuel and nanoparticles in the coolant. Climate change legislation being considered by congress now would shift the economics so that nuclear power would be projected by the DOE Energy Info Administration to nearly triple by 2030. This could reduce coal usage from 50% of electricity to 11%.

Just eliminating coal usage would save 30,000 lives per year in the USA, 100,000+ lives per year in Europe and 1 million lives per year globally. A nice benefit from reducing oil dependence and war risk reduction.

Actually understanding what is actaully causing the most lives to be lost and quantifying the actual real risks would help to pick the policies for saving multiple millions of lives and actually reducing risks of war.

3 million lives lost per year to outdoor air pollution (figure from the World Health Organization, people in developed and undeveloped countries using coal for electricity and oil in cars)

1.5 million lives lost per year to indoor air pollution (WHO, people in underdeveloped countries burning wood and coal in doors)

24% of all disease is caused by preventable environmental sources
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr32/en/index.html

24% of 55 million deaths per year
13 million deaths per year.

Clean air (get rid of coal plants and indoor coal usage, make the switch to cleaner cars and electric vehicles)

Clean water (sanitation to undeveloped places and get rid of coal plants -less mercury and arsenic and toxic metals)

Massive nuclear plant build out in China, India, United States and Europe would not increase nuclear war risks. All of those countries have or could get nuclear weapons now. It would reduce the competition for oil and save deaths from oil and coal.

Dale Carrico said...

As you surely know already from reading my discussions here on Amor Mundi I quite agree with you that we should eliminate contemporary civilization's disastrous disproportionate dependency on extractive petrochemical industry, and I quite agree with you that we should focus serious energies on providing the "miracle drug" of safe free access to clean water to everyone on earth.

I am pleased that you do not seem to have been bamboozled by lying "Clean Coal" proposals, but I am sorry to see that you are a booster for (dangerous, unhealthy, idiotically costly, politically centralizing) nuclear energy -- and, I will admit, I am utterly bewildered that you fail to see proliferating world-destroying nuclear weapons as a problem. You'll have to cut and paste quite a bit more statistics to convince me you're a serious person if you can't find your way to a recognition that flabbergastingly elementary!

More to the point, statistics aside, I do think you depend in much of this statement on a questionable premise -- a premise that directly correlates to those who would claim "tech advances" are inherently emancipatory (rather than, as I would insist, that they are emancipatory when social struggle and policy directs them to emancipatory ends).

In a nutshell, I would say that you are wrong to think that eliminating oil dependency would eliminate the cause of war. Every war is class war, every war is perpetuated and propagandized by a few against majorities who (soon enough) always disapprove of it. These few do so precisely because war is expected to be profitable to that few (and almost always, in fact, is -- their monstrous assumption is correct).

Eliminate "The Prize" of Oil and "The Great Game" will continue over territory, over water, over attention, over longevity.

Where representatives are actually beholden to the people war is an incomparably more difficult pursuit. Where profiting from war is unlikely war is an incomparably less appealing pursuit to those few who engage in it.

If you want to stop war you must make the always mobilized corporate-militarist societies more genuinely democratic (steeply progressive taxes, free diverse press, universal healthcare, education, basic income), and make genuine defensive infrastructure a completely non-profit activity.

It is not a socially indifferent accumulation of technical capacities that is emancipatory, it is not the lack of such a toy pile that causes injustice or war. These are social and political problems for which administration, education, agitation, organization, participation are the solutions (one glimpses this in contemplating the actual political organizing, social administration, and policy making that would have to drive some of the "real" engineering outcomes you sensibly advocate for -- eg, "make the switch to cleaner cars," "get rid of coal plants," eliminate "preventable environmental sources [of] disease," and so on).

Our instruments express and exacerbate our politics, they are not a substitute for them. To forget this (or fail to take it seriously) is never to become more realistic but always to stare into a mirage.

brian wang said...

Nuclear weapon proliferation is past tense. It already happened. The knowledge has proliferated. Not making any more nuclear energy power plants will not decrease the risk or roll back proliferation.

Rolling back proliferation would involve killing thousands of scientists and military personnel in the countries in question. Plus destroying facilities and records and then preventing the re-acquisition.

I don't think that this rollback could be effectively performed and I think that the consequences of attempting it would be worse than the solution.

90+% of the nuclear weapons are with the United States and Russia. The current situation is not one where either side is tempted to empty the silos onto the other.

Here is a basic lesson taken by applying actual history with the knowledge of basic military tactics.

If the United States chose to go all out in a conventional war. Then the same level of killing could be performed with conventional means as from a nuclear attack. A bombing campaign like operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder

864000 tons of bombs dropped.

The firebombing of Tokyo in WW2 dropped 1700 tons of bombs and killed 100,000 people over a few days. Notice that figure is in between the casualty figures for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

http://rokdrop.com/2005/03/13/1945-tokyo-fire-bombing/

So an operation rolling thunder dropped 500 times the bombs that killed 100,000.

Take out every bridge, air defense, port and transportation hub and hospital. Blockade the country. Carpet bombing every city and town in a target country performed using conventional weapons. Spread what would have been a non-pandemic disease like flu among the remaining populace and poison water and food supply.

That is equivalent or worse than nuclear bombing campaign performed over a few weeks.

Because you do not look at history and understand what conventional weapons have and can do you are and many others are overly focused on nuclear weapons.

This lack of understanding then results in more coal and oil air pollution. Millions die each year because you and others like you are afraid of the nuclear boogeyman. You cannot face the reality that the nuclear weapon genie is out of the bottle and that it actually lets weaker nations keep the stronger conventional military powers in check.

You also fail to notice that almost all countries got nuclear weapons before they got commercial nuclear power. You also fail to understand the science of the nuclear fuel cycle and that if you want nuclear weapons then getting nuclear materials from commercial nuclear power plants is the hard way to do it. this is why Iran is using centrifuges to purify the Uranium. N Korea made a special nuclear reactor for generating weapons grade material. N Korea does not a single nuclear reactor for generating nuclear power.

You do not question and research the actual history or science or try to understand the actual military situations.

My premises are based on actual history and actual facts. Technology advances are not inherently emancipatory, but actually understanding the situation can show that not building more nuclear reactors for energy does not make us safer.

It would be like not using certain medicines because they have certain similarities to the processes used to make poison weapons for the military. Except the military can still make their poisons even if the medicines are not made.

How can you claim to be a serious person is you are too lazy to research the actual issues?

I do not claim that eliminating oil dependency would eliminate the cause of war, but it would reduce one of the major tensions. By making one of the most volatile regions in the world (the middle east) less strategically important it would open up new options. Plus that is a tertiary possible bonus. The primary reasons are saving millions of lives lost to pollution (this is a no questions gain) and saving money from better health and less pollution damage while not increasing the risks of war and possibly reducing them.

Incremental risks do not go up if the primary growth countries and main economic powers build more nuclear reactors.
What is the incremental risk if China which already has nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons builds 300 nuclear power plants ? they already have hundreds of nuclear weapons.

If China and the US both have France levels of nuclear energy supplies, then is the risk of future conflict over oil reduced ?

Dale Carrico said...

Nuclear weapon proliferation is past tense. It already happened.

It happened, it is happening, and it can happen more. Are you serious?

Rolling back proliferation would involve killing thousands of scientists and military personnel in the countries in question.

What the hell are you talking about? These aren't logical abstractions we're talking about. Nobody is dreaming of disinventing nukes, we need to renew disarmament talks, live up to our old agreements and strengthen and extend them, and we need to enforce multilateral regulation and planetary monitoring of weapons proliferation.

Because you do not look at history and understand what conventional weapons have and can do you are and many others are overly focused on nuclear weapons.

This lack of understanding then results in more coal and oil air pollution. Millions die each year because you and others like you are afraid of the nuclear boogeyman. You cannot face the reality that the nuclear weapon genie is out of the bottle and that it actually lets weaker nations keep the stronger conventional military powers in check.


Lack of understanding, lack of research, lack of facts, blah blah blah. Yuck, just yuck! This isn't worth it. I'm sorry Brian, but I'm going to ask you nicely not to post here anymore. Your comments aren't welcome. You can tell yourself I'm too timid or stupid or sentimental or whatever to deal with your hardboiled perceptions and genius insights. But I am so angry and disgusted and actually shocked by your comments that it has spoiled some of my afternoon. I don't want to talk to you anymore, I don't respect what you are saying, I don't think you deserve a serious response, and I don't even feel good about offering a forum for what you are saying. I don't like feeling this way, I don't think I like you very much right now. Please go away.