Humanity's High Priority Problems

One issue with political discourse in our modern world is that a large amount of time and energy is spent debating what are really quite trivial issues.  For instance, many people, myself included, have very strong opinions about gay marriage, and how it should be either banned or enshrined as a basic human right.  This is important, but it is not as important as certain other issues which receive far less attention.  This post is an attempt to bring attention to these issues, which I'm calling humanity's High Priority Problems.

The main characteristic that gets an issue on my list of High Priority Problems is whether or not it credibly poses an existential threat to humanity.  While some religious fundamentalists believe that tolerance of homosexuality may provoke lethal vengeance from their god, these nutcases are a small minority.  As important as equal rights are to human political progress, whether or not gay marriage is banned or accepted has little influence on whether or not humanity will continue to survive as a species.  While I don't want to stop talking about these lower priority items, I want to start talking more about the high priority items, because I want the human race to survive.  If we don't start addressing these high priority problems, the most pessimistic dystopian dreams of our most creative artists could become our reality, and then the lower priority items will become completely irrelevant.

To further clarify what goes on my list, let me explain why the issue of climate change is not on the list.  I believe anthropogenic climate change is real, and that it will cause dramatic changes to the human world in the decades to come.  It will cause massive dislocation, starvation, and economic shocks.  However, I don't believe it poses an existential threat to the species.  I have a pretty good imagination, and the worst case I can imagine for climate change outcomes is that the human population is reduced to 20% of its current levels, living a difficult existence on a much less hospitable planet.  Ultimately, however, our species and its knowledge would survive and adapt to the new circumstances, presumably wiser for the experience.

The items on my list of High Priority Problems have possible outcomes that are worse than that.  If a problem credibly could result in the literal extinction of the human race, don't you think we should all be paying a bit more attention to it?  Sadly, we are not, and the reason is spooky.  The reasons we are not paying attention to these High Priority Problems is that the people who are on the dangerous side of them are the people who wield power in our society and control the cultural narrative.  We need to change this if we want to prevent these people from destroying our species, and much of the rest of the world with it.  Without further ado, here is the list.

High Priority Problem #1 - Nuclear Armageddon

If a major nuclear war were fought, where hundreds or thousands of warheads were launched, the resulting explosions and radiation would literally kill billions of people immediately or within days.  Worse than that, however, is the dust that would be kicked up into the atmosphere, where it would persist for months or years.  The resulting reduction of sunlight would result in the well-accepted phenomenon of nuclear winter.   It's not known exactly what it would take to produce a nuclear winter, or how bad it would be, but recent research concludes that

A nuclear war between the United States and Russia today could produce nuclear winter, with temperatures plunging below freezing in the summer in major agricultural regions, threatening the food supply for most of the planet.

It could be argued that this prediction is no worse than the climate change prediction I minimized earlier.  However, I think the nuclear disaster is much less predictable, given the nuclear fallout component, which is absent from climate change scenarios based on greenhouse gasses.  Like climate change, we don't know exactly what nuclear winter would be like, and some serious predictions go as far as to postulate human extinction as a realistic possibility.  

The other reason nuclear Armageddon makes it on the list ahead of climate change is that the cause and the cure are so much more clear and easy.  The threat of nuclear Armageddon, however likely or unlikely, is caused by nuclear weapons, plain and simple, and the solution is disarmament.  The fact that the United States alone possesses a nuclear arsenal capable of wreaking destruction that approaches human extinction, and that the power to launch that arsenal has been vested in one human being is insane beyond measure.  Anyone who created this situation or insists that this situation must persist is clearly a deranged psychopath who must be imprisoned for the safety of humanity.  Once that is done, we can set our engineers to the task of dismantling the weapons and converting the nuclear materials to safe, peaceful usage.

The causes of climate change, e.g, cars and factories, are arguably good and necessary parts of human culture.  Climate change is controversial precisely because people see climate change alarmists as attacking these pillars of of society.  What is the similar case in favor of nuclear weapons?  The intended use of nuclear weapons is death and destruction on a grand scale.  Their ostensible reason for existing unlaunched, i.e., defense, can be more ably and safely accomplished by many other strategies.  Anyone who argues otherwise is psychopathic or recklessly endangering humanity for financial gain.

The fact that my thoughts on this issue are considered fringe is a result of the fact that psychopaths control our country and media debate.  If this were not the case, why would the idea of peaceful coexistence be fringe and the status of being one President's bad day away from extinction be considered normal?  Those who are in power are preying on our fears, making us believe our lumbering, bloated military is keeping us safe, when in fact the opposite is true.  This is not the only issue on the list which raises the idea that the United States Military is the most dangerous organization on earth, much too dangerous to be allowed to exist.  Raising this debate to the forefront of our culture is of the utmost importance.  Oh, and if climate change really is your issue, the U.S. military is also the world's largest polluter. 

High Priority Problem #2 - Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is coming.  Not the narrow AI that wins chess tournaments or analyzes stock markets; that's already here.  The real AI that's coming is sometimes called AGI, for Artificial General Intelligence, which means an adaptable intelligence that's as good as or better than human intelligence.  Sure, scientists have been predicting that true AI is ten years away for the last fifty years, but eventually the reality will catch up with the predictions.  When that happens, would you rather the reality resemble the humble personage of Robin Willlams' character in Bicentennial Man, or the man vs. machine fight to the death depicted in stories like The Matrix and The Terminator?

Which reality we get will be determined by our sustained actions over the coming decades, during which AI will take shape, mature, and proliferate.  One of today's most respected futurists, inventor Ray Kurzweil, predicts in his book The Singularity Is Near that computing power equal to a human brain will be available for $1,000 in the year 2020.  By 2050, that thousand dollars will buy you computational power equal to all human brains combined.  The software needed to turn that computational power into strong AI is not far behind, previous failed predictions notwithstanding.  The central theme of Kurzweil's book is that we always mistake progress as a linear phenomena, when in fact history shows it's always exponential.  Progress builds on progress, and the future will always progress more quickly than the past.  I often wonder what my children's generation will accomplish, being the first generation to grow up with the Internet seeming to provide instant access to all of humanity's knowledge, which they effortlessly call up at a whim. 

You may not have paid much attention to AI, but a lot of incredibly smart and supremely ambitious people have paid an extraordinary amount of attention to it.  What do you know about these people's intentions and progress?  It is my contention that you know almost nothing, and that this oversight could be even more fatal than allowing our military to control the nuclear arsenal it does.  Of the two groups who have paid a lot of attention to AI, it's hard to decide which is more dangerous.  The academic researchers are in love with knowledge and invention for their own sake, and often spend little time mulling the possible implications of their work beyond the confines of the particular project they're currently working on.  I think academic researchers are the most likely to accidentally create a strong AI that might turn malicious.  On the other hand, the second group, the military and intelligence organizations of the world, are scary precisely because malicious AI is bound to be an explicit goal of some very expensive programs that are running right now.  Think about it.  They would be neglecting their duty if they were not pursuing these goals, and pursuing them in secret. And if there's one thing the military is good at, it's doing what they perceive to be their duty.  Unfortunately, in the paranoid world we encourage them to live in, they find it not only OK, but necessary to create new weapons and release them into the world.  Foremost among organizations of concern is the U.S. military, the only group to have used nuclear weapons, and the only group known to have used cyber weapons to attack other nations (Stuxnet and Flame).  Imagine what they must be doing that we don't know about.  Surely they are developing, or at least researching software and hardware that could manipulate or crash financial markets and transportation systems, AI to design even more powerful weapons, and ultimately technology for controlling human thought, either directly or indirectly.  If a Terminator future is going to arise, I predict it will do so from the careful, deliberate nurturing of the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex.  And you're enabling that if you're voting for Democrats or Republicans.

Given the possible negative implications of computer technology, some people will suggest a solution involving regulation or prohibition of the technology.  Such solutions are so naive and sure to fail that further comment is hardly necessary.  No aspect of human progress has ever been held back by the decrees of a supposed authority.  People who have thought a lot about this, such as Kurzweil, suggest a more practical strategy with a higher likelihood of success, which is to nurture and guide AI in the direction we want it to grow.  Azimov's Three Laws of Robotics are a classic example of a small set of principles that could be built into AI systems to ensure that they remain human-friendly as they evolve.  Kurzweil suggests we invest, as matter of high priority, in the research of ethical, guardian AI whose main reason for existence would be to search for a protect us against the malicious AI that is bound to arise.  Given the amount our government is spending on new technologies to destroy, it seems reasonable to suggest that we invest similar amounts researching new ways to protect.


High Priority Problem #3 - Attack of the Abstractions

The Matrix is actually several movies in one.  The primary story, which was referred to above, is an overt war between humanity and intelligent machines.  The metaphorical story behind this is the more important one, which informs a lot of my political thinking.  Morpheus sums it up most succinctly in the "woman in the red dress" scene:

The Matrix is a System, Neo.   That system is our enemy.  But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see?  Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters.  The very minds of the people we are trying to save.  But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and this makes them our enemy.  You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.  And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

All good science fiction is metaphorically a social commentary on the society in which the artists live.  In this respect, the system of The Matrix symbolizes the institutions that drive human culture, particularly commerce and the law.  In the service of these systems, individuals routinely harm other individuals.  But what are these systems?  They are abstractions of the human mind.  If advanced aliens came down and liquified all human brains, corporations and governments would cease to exist.  Their physical artifacts might remain, but without anyone around to understand their "meaning", the use to which they would be put by earth's remaining life would make clear the distinction between a physical artifact and its meaning within a system of abstractions.

Yet, as ethereal as these systems are, they dominate our thinking, and cause us to take many concrete actions in the world.  However, we spend about as much time thinking about these institutions as fish spend thinking about water.  In other words, not much.  Since they are so ubiquitous, so assumed before any conversation starts, we never examine what they are and what they are doing to us.  Instead, we usually focus on the other human beings, and engage in conflict with them, even though it is often a system we are fighting, and our supposed enemy is merely another human being, who is acting, often reluctantly or unknowingly, as an agent of an abstract system.

The way I see it, humanity is already locked in a life or death struggle with an interlocking set of intelligent alien races.  The main species are corporations and governments.  While these are human-created entities, they are even more alien than little green men or the bugs of Starship Troopers, since they have no physical bodies which can be seen and attacked.  They are parasites residing in the human mind, only visible to those who use their inner eyes to view abstraction space.  These parasites use us for their own ends, which are the same as our ends, namely self-preservation.  And like us, their self-interest is not always enlightened.  Many a parasite has failed by proving excessively lethal to its host.  Just because these abstractions depend on us for their existence doesn't mean they won't destroy us, either accidentally, or on purpose if they're able to discover a more reliable host.  Corporations and governments would be happy to play out their dramas in a world of computers, devoid of human beings, so don't become complacent due to the fact that they currently need us.

Corporations and governments are not all bad.  They have certainly enabled humanity to achieve momentous and useful things.  But unless we pay attention to them and shape them and control them while we still can, we can not ensure that they will remain human-friendly.  It's already arguable that we spend more time serving them than they spend serving us.  If we want human life to continue as one of the best existances available on this planet, we must learn to control our abstractions.


High Priority Problem #4 - Human Psychology

Our culture is kind of a mess.  A glorious, beautiful mess to be sure, but certainly suboptimal, to put it mildly,  War, exploitation, bigotry, and unnecessary cruelty and unpleasantness of all kinds abounds in all nations of the earth.  Many of our most spiritually advanced people recognize that nations themselves, along with other cherished institutions like religions are actually afflictions that are holding us back.  However, the ubiquity of these issues suggests that they are not some superficial, temporary problem that can be solved by some new policy.   The mess seems to be a deeply embedded feature of the tangle of human culture and individual human psychology.  The psychologies of individuals are at once culture's constituent parts and the products of its machinations.  Unraveling this interrelationship and figuring out how to create a more nurturing environment for new humans must surely rank at the top of the list of humanity's High Priority Problems.  If we could all be as healthy as possible, we would create better societies, and all of today's societal problems would melt away.  So you could say that the problem of human psychology is the granddaddy of all the other problems that could go on this list.

The study of human psychology is not exactly in its infancy, but it can hardly be said to be much beyond toddlerhood.  Prejudice, hidden agendas and ignorance abound, and extremely fundamental issues exist in almost all forms of psychological research.  For instance, it has been shown that any study that relies on people's self-report of their own mental activities or states is notoriously unreliable.  Yet a large fraction of psychological or sociological studies are based on self-report, or the only slightly more reliable report of trained observers, since no other measures exist for mental states.  This is starting to change with the advent of functional MRI, which allows researchers to objectively observe brain activity as mental tasks are being performed.  If properly nurtured, this type of research could help us understand how humans work, both on average, and in individual problematic cases.

Unfortunately, the general public still doesn't believe for the most part that human behavior is explained by brain physiology and dynamics.  For instance, most people eagerly judge drug addicts as simply "bad people", despite the fact that scientific evidence shows addiction corresponds to specific brain abnormalities which have specific societal causes.  How can we shift our culture from one that is quick to judge individuals and condemn them to circumstances that prevent their healing to one where compassion and harm reduction is the first response?  This question can be rephrased as, how can we put human psychology first in solving problems of human behavior?  The question is perhaps most accurately described as a spiritual problem for our culture.  Compassion can not be bullied or argued into other people. 

There is danger here too, even from those with the very best intentions.  After all, most people believe in the essential rightness of their actions, no matter how ignorant, deluded, or psychopathic they may be in truth.  Humans and human institutions are notoriously fallible, and many historical horrors, such as religious wars and genocides, have been unleashed by ambitions people who sincerely believed they had the answer for how we should all live most successfully.  Some consider Western medical science to be the most evolved approach to healing humans, but low success rates and unintended side effects cast doubt on this assessment.  Proper nutrition and avoidance of repressed emotion could probably do more to cure the world's mental suffering than all the pharmaceuticals dispensed by the harried physicians of today's industrialized disease management system. 

Given how easy it is to make mistakes in psychology, I would not want some centralized authority to dictate the ways in which all children should be raised and educated.  In fact, the very notion that any small group could know the best way for all humans to be themselves is at the root of many of our cultural diseases.  Accordingly, I believe that the way forward to is introduce more freedom and tolerance into our culture.  If our institutions focused less on prohibition and control, more people would be allowed to simply live their lives.  Beyond protecting life and property, we have no natural right to interfere in the lives of others, and this constant meddling, often in the most disagreeable and violent ways, is the direct cause of many societal problems, even when done by government programs with good intentions.  For instance, America's War on Drugs is a poster child for destructive, wasteful, and counter-productive government programs with good intentions.

Even more important, however, would be the long-term effects of increased freedom.  Once people were allowed to live how they liked, this would allow people to experiment with alternative lifestyles, families, and institutions.  Perhaps the ideal environment for nurturing new humans looks nothing like today's America.  Given the problems of today's America, this seems likely.  How can we ever discover what the ideal configurations are unless we allow free experimentation?  Evolutionary biology produced us.  If we want to produce the most evolved culture, we need to allow cultural evolution to occur.  For evolution to occur, variation from the norm must not only be tolerated, but encouraged.

Cultural evolution seems to me to be the most fruitful avenue for us to pursue for creating better and happier humans.  Therefore, I see cultural conformity and obedience to orthodoxy and tradition as the largest impediments to human progress. So maybe promoting acceptance of gay marriage is, in fact, the most important thing in the world today.  It's funny how discussions of human culture tend to mirror the thing itself, and wrap around in strange and wonderful ways.

If you got this far, you are obviously interested in humanity's big problems, and I would love to hear what you think about my list.  How would you suggest we address these problems?  What would you add to the list?