Catastrophe: Risk and Response

With the emerging trends in healthcare, many of today's young children will be alive in 2100. This would be a remarkable achievement. Then again, sometime in the next 100 years perhaps the entire human race including all today's children will die violent deaths. In Catastrophe, US Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner shows that humanity enters the 21st century with a greater chance of annihilation than at any time in human history. Mankind faces new perils that our institutions are not addressing. Posner does not just warn of dangers. He proposes solutions we can enact today that would reduce risk and improve world security for the next 100 years. His facts are well researched; his analysis is well thought out. Unfortunately, his writing is heavy. He uses large amounts of hard science, legal theory, and economic analysis. His major theme is that rapid scientific progress has created perils that our leaders are not addressing. In a short book, he addresses a large number of doomsday scenarios that would otherwise require years of study. None of the risks he discusses are likely to happen this year or in any particular year. However, as a group they pose a disturbing risk when looked at over a hundred years. He collects these horrific events into four groups 1) Natural disasters - This includes asteroids striking the earth, pandemic disease, and huge volcanoes and earthquakes. These have always been around and have caused mass destruction in the past. The other risks are new to the 21st century. 2) Perils caused by Economic Growth - This includes global warming, resource depletion, loss of biodiversity, and population growth. Posner looks critically at each. 3) Scientific Accidents - These include accidents with robots, artificial intelligence, robotic war machines, genetically modified crops, nanotechnology, and particle accelerators, These all sound like science fiction but Posner uses credible evidence to paint scenarios on how each could destroy the entire human race. 4) Intentional catastrophes - These include nuclear war, biological terror, cyber terror, surveillance, concealment, and encryption. His discussion of biological terror is especially disturbing. He cites evidence that nations, terrorist groups, or even crazed Unabomber type individuals may soon be able to create life forms that can kill billions of people. This is frightening but Posner does not stop here. He proposes solutions we can work on today to reduce the risk of each catastrophe. His solutions attempt to reduce each hazard while impairing our current standard of living as little as possible. Each proposal is painful and will disturb many people. 1) Fiscal solutions - He proposes increasing taxes and spending on science to address natural disasters and global warming. He uses economic tools to show that our current policies are inadequate to address these risks. His solutions will lead to a reduced standard of living for all of us. 2)

Looking out for future risk into the future. For example, asteroids pose a long-term risk hundreds and thousands of years into the future. We have the technology now to map asteroids and safeguard our future. To a large extent this is not being done. There is a lack of scientific enthusiasm to do this. Global warming is another topic of interest. Glaciers are melting right now. The gravity of the problem is increasing. However, it would be very expensive to do anything about it. So, not much is being done to correct the problem. Even if we reduce emissions into the atmosphere, the build-up is cumulative so that the problem increases even with reduced emisssions. Heavy taxes on CO2 emissions would be scientifically helpful, but politically impossible. Scientists tend to be either too pessimistic or too optimistic regarding the future. The reality, actually, is somewhere in the middle. Yet, the risks tend to be misstated. How does the marketplace respond to future risks? Reinsurance companies are very concerned about global warming. The risk is difficult to quantify. Global warming will effect the weather in the future. The author talks about the risks of terrorism. His position is that terrorism is very difficult to prevent. Our borders may be too porous. The author covers possible future disasters in this book which include biodiversity loss, sudden global warming, bioterrorists, asteroid impacts, and nuclear meltdowns. The core problem in dealing with these extinction threats is the need to spend large amounts of present resources for speculative future benefits. Science (C-Span 353/1)

Great Book, thoughtful and somewhat idiosyncratic analysis of how we should think about and respond to low probability but very large consequence events. Works very well paired up with Robert Shillers book "Macro Markets"

This book does a very good job of arguing that humans are doing an inadequate job of minimizing the expected harm associated with improbable but major disasters such as asteroid strikes and sudden climate changes. He provides a rather thorough and unbiased summary of civilization-threatening risks, and a good set of references to the relevant literature. I am disappointed that he gave little attention to the risks of AI. Probably his reason is that his expertise in law and economics will do little to address what is more of an engineering problem that is unlikely to be solved by better laws. I suspect he's overly concerned about biodiversity loss. He tries to justify his concern by noting risks to our food chain that seem to depend on our food supply being less diverse than it is. His solutions do little to fix the bad incentives which have prevented adequate preparations. The closest he comes to fixing them is his proposal for a center for catastrophic-risk assessment and response, which would presumably have some incentive to convince people of risks in order to justify its existence. His criticisms of information markets (aka idea futures) ignore the best arguments on this subject. He attacks the straw man of using them to predict particular terrorist attacks, and ignores possibilities such as using them to predict whether invading Iraq would reduce or increase deaths due to terrorism over many years. And his claim that scientists need no monetary incentives naively ignores their bias to dismiss concerns about harm resulting from their research (bias which he notes elsewhere as a cause of recklessness). His ambivalent comments about a science court convinced me that his version (and most others) would be too biased toward policies which serve the interests of scientific researchers. He claims that the most similar existing court has "not yielded convincing evidence that it is doing a better job with patent cases than the generalist federal appeals courts did", but Jaffe and Lerner's book Innovation and Its Discontents provides strong evidence that replacing generalist courts with a court devoted to patent appeals has caused disastrous special interest group domination of the U.S. patent system. I doubt new courts are needed. Instead, existing courts should adopt rules that measure reputations of peer-reviewed papers to resolve scientific disputes (e.g. how often they're cited, and the reputation of the journal in which they're published). Also, expanding use of idea futures markets should prod whatever institutions that judge those contracts to address an increasing number of disputes that courts or court-like institutions deal with. I have a number a smaller complaints: He doesn't prove his claim that if the uncertainty about global warming is greater than Kyoto-supporters admit then their case is stronger. That would be true it were just a disagreement over the standard deviation of a temperature forecast, but an uncertainty over wh

I'm a big fan of the judge's books, but this one differs from the prior books in the breadth and gravity of its topic: avoiding extinction. The book has a gripping description of several such threats -- asteroids, bioterrorists, nuclear meltdown ("strangelets"), sudden global warming, loss of biodiversity. The book is worth buying for the description alone. The core problem in dealing with these extinction threats is the need to incur large present costs for only speculative future benefits, where the beneficiaries of today's investments will be unknown to anyone living today. Democracies, run by politicians who get voted into office promising benefits to the current voters, can't make such farsighted investments for the benefit of people not yet living (or more precisely, not yet voting). The best line in the book (near the beginning, so I don't think I'm spoiling it) is that there are probably many billions of stars with planets around them capable of supporting life. Life therefore probably originated independently on many millions of those planets, many of them probably much earlier than here on Earth. So why haven't we been contacted by any of the earlier, presumably more advanced other civilizations?