21st Century Risks

On the LinkedIn network, engineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist D.K. Matai recently posed this question:

Which of the following 21st century asymmetric risks most concern you? Why and in which priority?

Climate Chaos; Global Credit Crunch; Dollar Decline; Energy Prices; Food & Basics Inflation; China's Rising Dominance; Middle East Instability; Iran/Pakistan 'Nuclear' Capability; Digital Attack and State Sponsored Hacking; Large scale Digital Identity Theft/Loss; Russia's Re-emergence; Environmental Degradation; Genetically Engineered Organisms; Water and Natural Resource shortages; Decline of Ethics in Business; Corruption; Proliferation of Robotics; Search Engine Technology; Nanotechnology; Artificial Intelligence; Financial Systemic Risk; Extremism and Radicalism; Blended Attacks; Demographic Skews; Pandemics; and Cyborgs/Transhumanism.

Here is the answer I gave:

Obviously, many of these items are interrelated. Still, I'll take the challenge and rank them, with commentary to show how they connect.

I've divided the listed risks into four levels of declining concern. On the top level are:

1. Nanotechnology
2. Climate Chaos
3. Environmental Degradation
4. Financial Systemic Risk

Today's nanoscale technologies pose little risk beyond familiar concerns of chemical toxicity and life-cycle assessment. However, as the field progresses toward general-purpose atomically-precise exponential manufacturing, it could present perilous issues ranging from an unstable arms race to severe economic disruption and more. There are as many potential benefits as there are possible dangers, of course, so we shouldn't consider halting or slowing nanotech R&D. What we must do is speed up investigation of the technology's powerful implications and seriously explore various options for international regulation.

Climate chaos already is causing environmental degradation and this will only get worse, possibly much worse and much faster than we are prepared for. Together these two issues easily could lead to financial systemic failures, and that process might be further accelerated by ill-advised attempts to deal with climate change using geoengineering techniques made possible by advanced nanotechnology, with unforeseen consequences causing the whole assemblage to spiral out of control. (Believe it or not, this is an optimistic scenario compared with some of the nano arms race and global dictatorship futures that I've seen described.)

On the second level are:

5. Water and Natural Resource Shortages
6. Pandemics
7. Genetically Engineered Organisms
8. Extremism and Radicalism

It's not too hard to see the relationships here, with shortages making pandemics worse, and with the temptation to use genetically modified/engineered organisms (GMO's) to solve both problems. I tend to think the GMO issue is often overrated, but that's only in isolation; combined with the other issues here, and especially when used either to promote or to combat extremism and radicalism, we can picture dystopian outcomes that would make a novelist hesitate.

My third level items, below, normally would be quite enough to cause foreboding about the future. It's too bad, though, that they are not all that we may have to deal with. I'm concerned about each of them, but not as much as the ones above.

9. China's Rising Dominance
10. Energy Prices
11. Food & Basics Inflation
12. Middle East Instability
13. Iran/Pakistan 'Nuclear' Capability
14. Global Credit Crunch
15. Corruption
16. Demographic Skews
17. Digital Attack and State Sponsored Hacking
18. Large scale Digital Identity Theft/Loss
19. Artificial Intelligence

Again, we can see how China's insatiable demands for growth could result in skyrocketing prices of energy, food, and other basics. Throw in a little Middle East instability, a global credit crunch, and some meta-level hacking and you've got a nasty near-future stew.

I'm considerably less worried about the items on the bottom level. While each brings its own potential problems, I suspect they'll be somewhat in the background when compared with the rest.

20. Dollar Decline
21. Russia's Re-emergence
22. Proliferation of Robotics
23. Cyborgs/Transhumanism
24. Search Engine Technology
25. Blended Attacks
26. Decline of Ethics in Business

So, where do you agree or disagree?

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[Tom Craver]

Well, they left out the top 3 risks faced by just about everyone in the world:

#1 cardio-vascular disease
#2 cancer
#3 age related disease

I ranked risks based on:
- danger - threat to the world,
- probability - likelihood of the threat being realized in the next ~50 years,
- urgency - how soon and vigorously we'd need to act to prevent it.

#4 Energy price increases. Taken to roughly mean "approaching and going over the oil peak". Worst cases seem to be major wars and economic collapse, which are fairly likely if we do nothing more to prepare. We have many ways to avoid that, but need to act quickly and vigorously.

#5 Iran/Pakistan nukes - Megadeath range mainly due to the war that their use would trigger. Fairly high chance Pakistan's bombs will get used - not just because radical islamics may get them, but because of factionalism among the radicals. The opportunity to do something sensible there is slipping away fast.

#6 Climate chaos - the worst impact would likely be a megadeath famine. Somewhat likely to get that bad. Getting started soon is important due to difficulty, but doing the wrong things fast won't help.

#7 Extremism / radicalism - worst case radical islam unites a large fraction of muslim nations, which might trigger a major war. Fairly small chance, but the opportunity to change policies and prevent it is slipping away fast.

#8, #9, #10 Pandemic, water shortages, environmental degradation.

If I leave out the immediacy factor - i.e. just looking at how dangerous things are likely to get over the next half century, Global Nuclear War (which I added) and AI are high, simply because they're both extinction level risks that aren't highly improbable.

Nanotech came in fairly high under that approach due to the potential for gigadeaths, but still below Energy and Pakistan nukes, due to the good chance that the benefits and defensive capabilities of nanotech will counter-balance both the severity and likelihood of the dangers.