From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2003 - 03:02:48 MDT
On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 07:49:49PM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> In the process of investigating some material for a paper I
> ran across a recent report by an European physicist who was
> allowed to visit North Korea.
>
> Impressions From a Visit to North Korea
> http://www.inesap.org/bulletin20/bul20art31.htm
>
> I found the article educational and a bit different from the
> spin we commonly get on the DPRK in the U.S.
If you want an even more different spin, look at
http://www.korea-dpr.com/ and http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm
It is fascinating in many ways.
> a) How do extropians/transhumanists deal with very strong cultures
> with very non-western priorities? (Be they through cultural history
> or brain-washing?) [This relates to the question of how does one
> interface with a culture that "sets priorities differently". Is
> one going to "brain-wash" citizens of the DPRK that western perspectives
> are more correct than those they have grown up with their entire lives?]
There is actually an interesting problem here. The Extropian Principles
doesn't give much ethical help since they are mostly about how *we* are
supposed to act ourselves, not much about how we are supposed to act
towards others. On the other hand, "reading between the lines" and
situating the principles in their humanistic-liberal ideological context
gives some more help.
The key points are open societies and self-direction. DPRK is awful in
this respect, almost the exact opposite. But the principles as such do
not tell us if it would be wrong to induce them on DPRK against its will
(except of course that doing so would also contradict the principles of
an open society and self-direction). But from the classical liberal
analysis, it is wrong to try to impose one's views onto others even when
one considers them really good - with the exception of a minimalistic
but universal bedrock of human rights. It is here you could actually get
support to do something towards DPRK, in order to make sure the people
there enjoyed univeral human rights (another thing to debate is of
course the exact list of rights; I don't have the time and space to go
into it except to note that there are important issues in avoiding UN
declaration style positive rights and that negative rights are more
important).
So this ethical approach would say that societies like DPRK should be
left alone as long as they respect human rights, and if they don't we
ideally should help their people get human rights using as minimal means
as possible. No need to storm every luddite enclave, just make sure they
are kind to their children and cannot isolate them completely.
> b) How does one deal with the entropic issue that the diplomatic
> route may ultimately be extremely wasteful? Though I'm sure Nick
> will not appreciate my citing his paper in this context, his
> "Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological
> Development" paper
> http://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html
> helps to shape the discussion.
>
> The numbers speak for themselves -- 10^14 potential human lives
> per second of delayed interstellar colonization (minimum).
>
> So lets see,
> Afghanistan (pop: 28m), Iraq: (pop: 25m), N. Korea (pop: 22m)
>
> So we could eliminate the problems distracting us from making
> progress at the cost of < 10^8 lives -- compared with 10^14
> lives *per second* while we keep debating how to resolve the
> problems...
<Roasting On>
Emlyn correctly pointed out that potential people do not have the
ethical weight of real people. If they did, then contraceptives would be
murder.
Also, this is a good example of how consequence ethics need to look at
complete second order effects. The first order effect is the removal of
certain people (very negative). The second order effect is a *predicted*
(note that there is uncertainty here!) removal of distraction leading to
a glorious future (a high reward times a very uncertain probability
term). But there is also a probability ~1 effect of *lots* of people
hating whoever did that fiercely - it is one thing for anti-american
demonstrators to call the US genocidal, but if it actually did kill
millions you would get a massive worldwide humanitarian reaction as well
as millions of people thinking "OK, they are a threat against us. How do
we take them down?". So the total second order effect would likely be
slightly negative (glorious future minus being hated nearly everywhere).
The third order effect is of course when people start to put their plans
of taking you down into motion. Millions of Osamas with lots of
government support. This extremely likely third order effect is also
extremely likely to be negative, since it would be a ridiculously strong
distraction, and in fact might view any ideological reasoning used to
justify the primary action tainted for a very long time (think of how
avoiding dysgenics still remains taboo 70 years after the Reich).
From an engineering perspective, it is a bit like using a dirty nuke to
build a ditch needed for a vacation resort. It makes a ditch of
uncertain usability and makes the resort impossible.
This is also why I don't think basic utilitarian arguments work: they do
not have any safeguards against atrocities for the common good.
<Roasting Off>
The value of diplomacy depends on the situation and how it is run. Also,
there are more tools than killing people or talking to diplomats,
fortunately. What really brought down the soviet union was that certain
western memes could spread and exploit the inherent weaknesses of the
system; it was largely aided by widespread information diffusion rather
than any concerted psyops effort. Make communications equipment more
available, and certain systems become unstable. Inefficient systems will
see their own inefficiencies if they engage in trade, and have an
incentive of becoming more efficient (and in the economy today you win
greatly by having free, creative and entrepreneurial citizens unless you
are a single raw-material nation) as well as not attacking their trade
partners. And so on. The world system is a much more complicated system
than a game of Risk.
DPRK is a hard nut to crack, since it has 1) isolated itself to a unique
extent. 2) stayed off the radar until very recently so that the nations
with an interest to sneak democracy into it have not had the time to do
any real efforts. This leads to a situation where it needs outside
support to survive due to its own inefficiency (which would likely
destroy it fairly quickly otherwise), promting it to blackmail. My
suggestion would be to stall the blackmail (that is one thing diplomacy
is wonderful for) while really finding creative ways of creating
stronger communications links to the outside world - in DPRK, they
actually are weapons of mass destruction. But even then it will take
time.
> I'd rather see strong
> arguments that justify a suboptimal extropic vector (perhaps
> one has to sacrifice optimal paths to practical considerations).
> It is just starting to look like each U.S. citizen is on the
> hook for about ~$350 this year for activities in Iraq and
> we already have a huge sunk cost (in nuclear weapons) in
> the means to eliminate that expense (ignoring Afghanistan
> & N. Korea).
Governments are good at suboptimality.
Note that we are not sacrificing the optimal path by the current
strategies, they still keep it open. They are expensive, inefficient and
likely could be done much better. But then the issue is doing them much
better rather than switching to a completely different strategy that in
many ways is worse.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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