Babbling on Singleton Governance

By EdoArad @ 2019-06-23T04:59 (+1)

A Singleton is a world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level. See https://nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html for a succinct summary, and some analysis of possible pros and cons.

Let's assume extraordinary technological breakthroughs that may cause one entity (a state or a financial company) to have massive economic dominance (say: slow AI takeoff, free energy from fusion reactors, advanced nanotech) or massive offensive dominance (cyber-warfare capabilities, undetectable nuclear weapons, DNA-targeted bioweapons). In this case, that entity may decide to claim power over civilization.

Considering that it is possible that a singleton is unavoidable, and that it may be easy to remain locked in to such a governance, it is of obvious importance to the future of humanity.

The main idea I want to bring out in this post is that the formation of a singleton in the near future is perhaps likely (even without strong AI or a great power war), and I'd like to see further discussion on this topic.

aarongertler @ 2019-06-23T21:30 (+2)

When you use the term "babbling", do you mean it in the sense of this post?

An excerpt:

Babble with a weak heuristic to generate many more possibilities than necessary, Prune with a strong heuristic to find a best, or the satisfactory one.

edoarad @ 2019-06-24T07:53 (+5)

Actually, it is from Robin Hanson, encountered recently when reading this interesting post from someone who recreated GPT2 and considered publishing the result :)

edoarad @ 2019-07-05T18:58 (+1)

Hypersonic missiles are An example of a possible game changing weapon.