Daniel Schmachtenberger on Designing Post-Capitalist Systems To Manage Existential Risk

Podcast via https://futurethinkers.org/daniel-schmachtenberger-existential-risks/

Description

"An existential risk is anything that can cause the extinction of humanity. A catastrophic risk is one that can cause our near-extinction, or destroy human civilization as we know it. Existential and catastrophic risks are often divided into human induced risks and natural phenomena.

The natural phenomena include things like huge asteroids hitting the Earth, and solar flares or coronal mass ejections with a high enough intensity to knock out our power grid, destabilize nuclear cooling stations and lead to uninhabitable biosphere and ocean acidification.

Human Risks: Although natural risks are important to look at, Daniel Schmachtenberger is more concerned about human induced existential risks. These include man-made climate change, which can cause agricultural failure, mass migration, and ultimately state failure and war. It also includes the risk from nuclear weapons and exponentially growing technologies like AI, biotechnology, and nanotechnology.

Daniel Schmachtenberger claims that an underlying problem behind many of man-made existential risks is our collective loss of ability to make sense of the world. With the rise of fake news, scientific research being funded by corporate interests, and technologies evolving faster than we can keep up with, it’s getting harder and harder to understand what is true and what is important.

We have a system that runs on competitive advantage, both in national markets and a global level. This system is based on win-lose game theory, which incentivizes actions that give people and entities a competitive advantage, rather than actions that benefit humanity as a whole. This leads to pharmaceutical companies wasting time and talent repeating research (or not doing it at all if it’s non-patentable) while people die, and the earth holding enough nukes to wipe out the planet more than 10 times over.

Far from hopeless, Daniel reminds us that most of what we think of as “flawed human nature” is actually just social conditioning. Conditioning which is possible to change, or redirect with properly placed incentives.

The fundamental question Daniel is trying to answer is this: how do we design a system inside which all incentives are properly aligned, and we start valuing things around us for their systemic and not differential value?"

(https://futurethinkers.org/daniel-schmachtenberger-existential-risks/)